Quotes from David Nicholls

So must people hate their jobs.That's why they're called it jobs

I suppose the important thing is to make some sort of difference,' she siad. 'You know, actually change something.' 'What, like "change the world", you mean?' 'Not the whole entire world. Just the little bit around you.

She made you decent, and in return, you made her so happy.

Work hard at . . . something.

Emma was a shocking driver, simultaneously sloppy and petrified, and for the first fifty miles had been absent-mindedly driving with her spectacles on top of her contact lenses so that other traffic loomed menacingly out of nowhere like alien space cruisers.

You know what I can't understand? You have all these people telling you all the time how great you are, smart and funny and talented and all that, I mean endlessly, I've been telling you for years. So why don't you believe it?

Recently he has noticed idiocy creeping up on him. His resolve to keep his head on straight, his feet on the ground, is failing and he has observed, quite objectively, that he is becoming more thoughtless, selfish, making more and more stupid remarks. He has tried to do something about this but it almost feels out of his control now, like pattern baldness. Why not just give in and be an idiot? Stop caring.

She realises that if she is to save the show she is going to have to improvise a rousing speech, one of the many Henry V moments that make up her working life.

The early days of any relationship are punctuated with a series of firsts - first sight, first words, first laugh, first kiss, first nudity, etc., with these shared landmarks becoming more widely spaced and innocuous as days turn to years, until eventually you're left with first visit to a National Trust property or some such.

but they had also settled into the maddening familiarity of friendship; maddening for her at least.

She no longer think that a situation could be made better by writing a poem about it.

Find the thing you love, and do it with all your heart, to the absolute best of your ability, no matter what people say.

No-one ever built a statue of a critic.

Josh likes to say he put the funk in 'functional'. Personally I think he just put the ass in 'embarrassing', but, hey, what do I know?

But how can you not like music? That's the same as not liking food! Or sex!

Well I can tell you now that married life is not a plateau, not at all. There are ravines and great jagged peaks and hidden crevasses that send the both of you scrabbling into darkness. Then there are dull, parched stretches that you feel will never end, and much of the journey is in fraught silence, and sometimes you can't see the other person at all, sometimes they drift off very far away from you, quite out of sight, and the journey is hard. It is just very, very, very hard.

I don't think there's anything we can do, is there? We either stop or we carry on.

If she does have a failing, and it's obviously only a tiny one, it's that she doesn't seem particularly curious about other people, or me, anyway.

Travelling', she sighed.'So predictable.' 'What's wrong with travelling?' 'Avoiding reality more like.' 'I think reality is over-rated,' he said in the hope that this might come across as dark and charismatic.

I love that sound,' he mumbled into her hair. 'Blackbirds at dawn.' 'I hate it. Makes me think I've done something I'll regret.

Your last letter made me laugh so much, Em, but you should still get out of there because while it's good for gags it's definitely bad for your soul. You can't throw years of your life away because it makes a funny anecdote.

Everyone likes me. It's my curse.

From an evolutionary point of view, most emotions – fear, desire, anger – serve some practical purpose, but nostalgia is a useless, futile thing because it is a longing for something that is permanently lost, and I felt its futility now.

it's rapidly becoming clear that the so-called best years of my life are never going to happen