Top 180 David Nicholls Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 3 of 4

101. “Whenever I hear Edith Piaf sing “Non, je ne regrette rien” – which is more often than I’d like, now that I’m at university – I can’t help thinking, What the hell is she talking about? I regret pretty much everything.”

— David Nicholls

102. “If there’s anything I’m keen to get better at in my writing, then it’s the writing of prose as opposed to the writing of dialogue.”

— David Nicholls

103. “But at the best of times she feels like a character in a Muriel Spark novel – independent, bookish, sharp-minded, secretly romantic.”

— David Nicholls

104. “She had never been a proficient flirt. Her spasms of kittenish behaviour were graceless and inept, like normal conversation on roller skates. but the combination of the retsina and sun made Emma feel sentimental and light-headed. She reached for her roller skates.”

— David Nicholls

105. “Here people cycled with a reckless swagger, talking on the phone and eating breakfast.”

— David Nicholls

106. “At university, I used to write silly little sketches and monologues, but never fiction.”

— David Nicholls

107. “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?”

— David Nicholls

108. “As a novelist, I’m incredibly lucky to make a living, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t lie awake at four o’clock in the morning, worrying.”

— David Nicholls

109. “Afterward, there was some debate as to whether we’d actually “done it properly,” which gives you some idea of the awesome skill and artful dexterity of my lovemaking technique.”

— David Nicholls

110. “No.’ She took my hand. ‘Let’s make a French exit.’ ‘What’s a French exit?’ ‘It’s when you leave without saying goodbye.’ ‘I’ve never heard that before.’ A French exit; no thank you for having me, no I’ve had a lovely time. To just walk away, cool and aloof. I wondered if I could.”

— David Nicholls

111. “I think reality is over-rated.”

— David Nicholls

112. “You start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it’s enough to tell a few good jokes.”

— David Nicholls

113. “The city had defeated her, just like they said it would. Like some overcrowded party, no one had noticed her arrival, and would notice if she left.”

— David Nicholls

114. “I really was a terrible actor. I did it for years in my twenties because it was like being at university again.”

— David Nicholls

115. “I had made this mistake once before, on a school trip to the Victoria and Albert Museum, when I followed a sign marked WOMEN, thinking it was an exhibition on the changing roles of women in society, and actually ended up standing in the ladies’ toilets.”

— David Nicholls

116. “What must that be like? To be admired before you’ve even said a word, to be desired two or three hundred times a day by people who have absolutely no idea what you’re like?”

— David Nicholls

117. “Paris was all so... Parisian. I was captivated by the wonderful wrongness of it all – the unfamiliar fonts, the brand names in the supermarket, the dimensions of the bricks and paving stones. Children, really quite small children, speaking fluent French!”

— David Nicholls

118. “My wife at fifty-two years old seems to me just as attractive as the day I first met her. If I were to say this out loud, she would say, ‘Douglas, that’s just a line. No one prefers wrinkles, no one prefers grey.’ To which I’d reply, ‘But none of this is a surprise. I’ve been expecting to watch you grow older ever since we met. Why should it trouble me? 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

119. “A moment passed, perhaps half a second when their faces said what they felt, and then Emma was smiling, laughing, her arms around his neck.”

— David Nicholls

120. “The tourist’s paradox: how to find somewhere that’s free of people exactly like us.”

— David Nicholls

121. “There’s a particular grubbiness that comes with travel. You start showered and fresh in clean and comfortable clothes, upbeat and hopeful that this will be like travel in the movies; sunlight flaring on the windows, heads resting on shoulders, laughter and smiles with a lightly jazzy soundtrack. But in reality the grubbiness has set in.”

— David Nicholls

122. “And it was at moments like this that she had to remind herself that she was in love with him, or had once been in love with him, a long time ago.”

— David Nicholls

123. “Familiarity, globalisation, cheap travel, mere weariness had diluted our sense of foreign-ness.”

— David Nicholls

124. “She had reached a turning point. She no longer believed that a situation could be made better by writing a poem about it.”

— David Nicholls

125. “For his thirtieth birthday he had filled a whole night-club off Regent Street; people had been queuing on the pavement to get in. The SIM card of his mobile phone in his pocket was overflowing with telephone numbers of all the hundreds of people he had met in the last ten years, and yet the only person he had ever wanted to talk to in all that time was standing now in the very next room.”

— David Nicholls

126. “I still find it absurdly difficult to concentrate on a novel if there’s a phone or computer to hand; I have taken to locking them outside the room like noisy pets.”

— David Nicholls

127. “Emotional intelligence, the perfect oxymoron!”

— David Nicholls

128. “At the end of the day, the harsh reality is that if you’re a fan of Kate Bush, Charles Dickens, Scrabble, David Attenborough and University Challenge, then there’s not much out there for you in terms of a youth movement.”

— David Nicholls

129. “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.”

— David Nicholls

130. “A joke was not a single-use item but something you brought out again and again until it fell apart in your hand like a cheap umbrella.”

— David Nicholls

131. “I have always been well liked, I think, always well regarded and respected, but having few enemies is not the same as having many friends, and there was no denying that I was, if not “lonely”, more solitary than I’d hoped to be at that time.”

— David Nicholls

132. “They say the personal is political and it’s certainly fair to say that, like her politics, Rebecca Epstein’s kissing is radical, forthright and uncompromising.”

— David Nicholls

133. “And it’s true, I have a perfectly fine face, eyes that may well be ‘kind’ but are also the brownest of browns, a reasonable-sized nose and the kind of smile that causes photographs to be thrown away.”

— David Nicholls

134. “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.”

— David Nicholls

135. “An adaptation leads the cinema-goer to the original to find out what they’re missing and if they already know the book, it can still illuminate a theme, a character, an idea.”

— David Nicholls

136. “When you’re reading a book, you’re always looking for the natural place to stop. With a movie, you can’t really have that sense of it coming momentarily to a halt; there’s pressure to keep the momentum up.”

— David Nicholls

137. “I usually write on a computer – unless I get stuck, at which point I switch to write by hand. I think that’s common among writers if they get cornered on something.”

— David Nicholls

138. “I’m aware that couples tend to embellish ‘how we met’ folklore with all kinds of detail and significance. We shape and sentimentalise these first encounters into creation myths to reassure ourselves and our offspring that it was somehow ‘meant to be’.”

— David Nicholls

139. “He presses two fingers against each eye and attempts to account for this crippling melancholy, but is having trouble with rational thought. It feels as if someone has taken his head and shaken it. Words are turning to mush and he can see no plausible way of getting through this. Don’t fall apart, he tells himself, not here, not now. Hold it together.”

— David Nicholls

140. “I’ve been a compulsive reader for as long as I can remember.”

— David Nicholls

141. “She was reaching the limits of how much its possible to change a man.”

— David Nicholls

142. “This, I thought, is why we have comfort zones, because they are comfortable. What can possibly be gained by leaving them?”

— David Nicholls

143. “The problem with telling people that they can do anything they want to do is that it is objectively, factually inaccurate. Otherwise the whole world would just be ballet dancers and pop stars.”

— David Nicholls

144. “The fact was I loved my wife to a degree that I found impossible to express, and so rarely did.”

— David Nicholls

145. “She was always going to be the smartest, kindest, funniest, loyalest person we would ever meet, and the fact of her not being here well it just isn’t right.”

— David Nicholls

146. “Their lips touched now, mouths pursed tight, their eyes open, both of them stock still. The moment held, a kind of such glorious confusion.”

— David Nicholls

147. “I love you is an interesting phrase, in that apparently small alterations–taking away the I, adding a word like lots or loads–render it meaningless.”

— David Nicholls

148. “She liked to ‘leave dishes to soak’, an act of self-deception that I’ve always abhorred.”

— David Nicholls

149. “Like I said, I’m fine. I don’t ever think of her.’ And I didn’t ever think of her, except from time to time.”

— David Nicholls

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

— David Nicholls