Top 180 David Nicholls Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 4

51. “The attraction of a life devoted to sensation, pleasure and self would probably wear thin one day, but there was still plenty of time for that yet.”

— David Nicholls

52. “You’ve got to stop letting women slip drugs into your mouth, Dex, it’s unhygienic. And dangerous. One day it’ll be a cyanide capsule.”

— David Nicholls

53. “Failure and unhappiness is easier because you can make a joke out of it.”

— David Nicholls

54. “As the possibility of a relationship had faded, Emma had endeavored to harden herself to Dexter’s indifference and these days a remark like this caused no more pain than, say, a tennis ball thrown sharply at the back of her head.”

— David Nicholls

55. “Salmon. Salmon, salmon, salmon, salmon. I eat so much salmon at these weddings, twice a year I get this urge to swim upstream.”

— David Nicholls

56. “Once you decide not to worry about that stuff anymore, dating and relationships and love and all that, it’s like you’re free to get on with real life.”

— David Nicholls

57. “I would never complain about ‘One Day’ taking off, but it made me painfully self-conscious for a long time.”

— David Nicholls

58. “I’m trying to be inspiring! I’m trying to lift your grubby soul for the great adventure that lies ahead of you!”

— David Nicholls

59. “Imagine staying awake all night not because you’re worried about the future but because it’s FUN.”

— David Nicholls

60. “He could feel her laughter against his chest, and at that moment he thought that there was no better feeling than making Emma Morley laugh.”

— David Nicholls

61. “This isn’t a letter, it’s a gift.”

— David Nicholls

62. “She shouldn’t speak her thoughts; nothing good ever came of speaking your thoughts.”

— David Nicholls

63. “It’s in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield.”

— David Nicholls

64. “She used to pride herself on her refusal to see two sides of an argument, but increasingly she accepts that issues are more ambiguous and complicated than she once thought.”

— David Nicholls

65. “When I was an actor, I worked with lots of men who had a bit of success early on, who were very good looking, who suddenly made a bit of money and who felt no embarrassment – and nor should they have done – about having a good time.”

— David Nicholls

66. “Cuddling was for great aunts and teddy bears. Cuddling gave him cramp.”

— David Nicholls

67. “She made a firm resolution, one of the resolutions she was making almost daily these days. No more sleepovers, no more writing poetry, no more wasting time. Time to tidy up your life. Time to start again.”

— David Nicholls

68. “The problem with all these fiercely individualistic girls was that they were all exactly the same.”

— David Nicholls

69. “Read a book at the right age and it will stay with you for life.”

— David Nicholls

70. “Light travels differently in a room that contains another person; it reflects and refracts so that even when she was silent or sleeping I knew that she was there.”

— David Nicholls

71. “I think I became a writer because I used to write letters to my friends, and I used to love writing them. I loved the idea that you can put marks on a page and send it off, and two days later, someone laughs somewhere else in the world.”

— David Nicholls

72. “Was it the happiest day of our lives? Probably not, if only because the truly happy days tend not to involve so much organisation, are rarely so public or so expensive. The happy ones sneak up, unexpected.”

— David Nicholls

73. “I work three days at home, and two days in the British Library or the London Library, just to get out of the house and hide from the children.”

— David Nicholls

74. “David Holdaway was my stage name. I was an actor for about eight years in the ’90s. I had to change my name because there was another David Nicholls, and I thought if I changed it to my mother’s name, she’d be touched.”

— David Nicholls

75. “There’s a saying, cited in popular song, that if you love someone you must set them free. Well, that’s just nonsense. If you love someone, you bind them to you with heavy metal chains.”

— David Nicholls

76. “We can just hang out and walk and read and talk and stuff.”

— David Nicholls

77. “I had always been led to believe that ageing was a slow and gradual process, the creep of a glacier. Now I realise that it happens in a rush, like snow falling off a roof.”

— David Nicholls

78. “I suppose the important thing is to make some sort of difference.”

— David Nicholls

79. “It’s the face itself that I love, not that face at twenty-eight or thirty-four or forty-three. It’s that face.”

— David Nicholls

80. “In the future, I’ll be braver, she told herself. In the future, I will always speak my mind, eloquently, passionately.”

— David Nicholls

81. “I love Billy Wilder, and I love the way that his films can be very touching and very moving and very romantic, and at the same time there’s always a little cynical undertone, there’s always something that undercuts things.”

— David Nicholls

82. “I think probably I’m quite sentimental; I like big emotional stories, I like being moved by things, but I think I’m very embarrassed by sentiment. I’m very embarrassed by corniness.”

— David Nicholls

83. “To have had fame, even very minor fame, and to have lost it, got older and maybe put on a little weight is a kind of living death.”

— David Nicholls

84. “Everything was fine, and she had the rare, new sensation of being exactly where she wanted to be.”

— David Nicholls

85. “This might sound really foolish, but when I came to Edinburgh in 1988 I had spent nearly all my life living south of Bristol, and I was just amazed that a city like Edinburgh was actually in the British isles.”

— David Nicholls

86. “All young people worry about things, it’s a natural and inevitable part of growing up, and at the age of sixteen my greatest anxiety in life was that I’d never again achieve anything as good, or pure, or noble, or true, as my O-level results.”

— David Nicholls

87. “Well, it’s so hard for books to take off. You give years of your life to something that probably won’t happen, so when it does, it feels a little unjust.”

— David Nicholls

88. “No matter how predictable, banal and listless the rest of my life might be, you can guarantee that there’ll always be something interesting going on with my skin.”

— David Nicholls

89. “Maybe we’ve grown out of each other.”

— David Nicholls

90. “Sometimes, when it is going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationary.”

— David Nicholls

91. “As soon as she’d met him at the arrivals gate on his return from Thailand, lithe and brown and shaven-headed, she knew that there was no chance of a relationship between them. Too much had happened to him, too little had happened to her.”

— David Nicholls

92. “Were helping build capability and capacity in the new Iraqi Navy.”

— David Nicholls

93. “I know from your letters and from seeing you after your play that you feel a little bit lost right now about what to do with your life, a bit rudderless and oarless and aimless but that’s okay that’s alright because we’re all meant to be like that at twenty-four. In fact our whole generation is like that. I read an article about it, it’s because we never fought in a war or watched too much television or something.”

— David Nicholls

94. “I’ve only ever been recognised in the street once. In Sweden, strangely.”

— David Nicholls

95. “He’s a better person when she’s around, and isn’t that what friends are for, to raise you up and keep you at your best?”

— David Nicholls

96. “No, friends were like clothes: fine while they lasted but eventually they wore thin or you grew out of them.”

— David Nicholls

97. “I think you actually get a kick out of being disappointed and under-achieving, because it’s easier, isn’t it? Failure and unhappiness is easier because you can make a joke out of it.”

— David Nicholls

98. “You must do what you enjoy.”

— David Nicholls

99. “The future rose up ahead of her, a succession of empty days, each more daunting and unknowable than the one before her.”

— David Nicholls

100. “There’s no shortage of orphans in 19th-century literature, but it’s hard to find a single happy, communicative, functional parental relationship in the whole of ‘Great Expectations,’ even among the minor characters.”

— David Nicholls