Top 180 David Nicholls Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “She glanced at the other diners, all of them going into their act, and thought is this what it all boils down to? Romantic love, is this all it is, a talent show?”

— David Nicholls

152. “Yet there seemed to be no easy correlation between the awful grief I felt at her death and our closeness – or lack of it – in life, and it occurred to me that perhaps grief is as much regret for what we have never had as sorrow for what we have lost.”

— David Nicholls

153. “Letters, like compilation tapes, were really vehicles for unexpressed emotions and she was clearly putting far too much time and energy into them.”

— David Nicholls

154. “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.”

— David Nicholls

155. “What about damp? What about flooding? Wouldn’t it make sense to have a little lawn or garden as a sort of buffer zone between the house and the water? But then it wouldn’t be Venice, said Connie’s voice in my head. Then it would be Staines.”

— David Nicholls

156. “It would be inappropiate, undignified, at 38, to conduct friendships or love affairs with the ardour or intensity of a 22 year old. Falling in love like that? Writing poetry? Crying at pop songs? Dragging people into photobooths? Taking a whole day to make a compilation tape? Asking people if they wanted to share your bed, just for company? If you quoted Bob Dylan or TS Eliot or, god forbid, Brecht at someone these days they would smile politely and step quietly backwards, and who would blame them? Ridiculous, at 38, to expect a song or book or film to change your life.”

— David Nicholls

157. “And they did have fun, though it was of different kind now. All that yearning and passion had been replaced by a steady pulse of pleasure and satisfaction and occasional irritation, and this seemed to be a happy exchange; if there had been moments in her life when she had been more elated, there had never been a time when things had been more constant.”

— David Nicholls

158. “Apparently the nation’s future lay not in innovation and development but in global finance and telesales, in the entertainment industry and coffee shops.”

— David Nicholls

159. “The unrequited love of ones’ only living offspring has its own particular slow acid burn.”

— David Nicholls

160. “No-one ever built a statue of a critic.”

— David Nicholls

161. “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.”

— David Nicholls

162. “Then they kiss again, and she goes to work, and he goes to work, and so the days go by, faster than ever.”

— David Nicholls

163. “It had sometimes puzzled me why falling in love should be regarded as some wondrous event, accompanied by soaring strings, when it so often ended in humiliation, despair or acts of awful cruelty.”

— David Nicholls

164. “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.”

— David Nicholls

165. “There is a point in the future where even the worst disaster starts to settle into an anecdote.”

— David Nicholls

166. “Okay, well I think the programme is like being screamed at for an hour by a drunk with a strobe-light, but like I said –.”

— David Nicholls

167. “He has found himself more and more reliant on her at exactly the point that she has become less available to him.”

— David Nicholls

168. “Why, I wondered, did people seek out portrayals of the very experiences that, in real life, would send them mad with despair? Shouldn’t art be an escape, a laugh, a comfort, a thrill? No, said Connie, exposure brought understanding. Only by confronting the worst traumas of life could you comprehend them and face them down, and off we’d trot to watch another play about man’s inhumanity to man.”

— David Nicholls

169. “While there was breath in my body, she would never lack sufficient AA batteries.”

— David Nicholls

170. “Our biographies involve each other so intrinsically now that we’re both on nearly every page. We know the answers because we were there, and so curiosity becomes hard to maintain; replaced, I suppose, by nostalgia.”

— David Nicholls

171. “In portraiture I look for people that I recognise – ‘Look, it’s Uncle Tony’ – or for the faces of film stars. The Madame Tussaud’s school of art appreciation.”

— David Nicholls

172. “Well, I don’t think Hollywood’s a dirty word at all, I love a lot of Hollywood films.”

— David Nicholls

173. “Of course, after nearly a quarter of a century, the questions about our distant pasts have all been posed and we’re left with ‘how was your day?’ and ‘when will you be home?’ and ‘have you put the bins out?’ Our biographies involve each other so intrinsically now that we’re both on nearly every page. We know the answers because we were there, and so curiosity becomes hard to maintain; replaced, I suppose, by nostalgia.”

— David Nicholls

174. “There may well be a scientific paper to be written on why walking in an art gallery is so much more exhausting than, say, climbing Helvellyn. My guess is that it is something to do with the energy required to hold muscles in tension, combined with the mental exertion of wondering what to say.”

— David Nicholls

175. “The idea that someone, man or woman, should receive any kind of extra attention or affection or popularity or respect or adulation, simply because of a quirk of genetics and some arbitrary male-media-defined subjective notion of ‘beauty’ seems to me inherently wrong and unacceptable.”

— David Nicholls

176. “Lonely’ is a troubling word and not one to be tossed around lightly. It makes people uncomfortable, summoning up as it does all kinds of harsher adjectives, like ‘sad’ or ‘strange’. 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

177. “Conversation, the gradual unveiling of oneself, one’s quirks and characteristics, opinions and beliefs; what a fraught and awkward business that is.”

— David Nicholls

178. “As a matter of fact, I think there are more things important in life than “relationships.”

— David Nicholls

179. “He hadn’t been this nervous since the last disastrous night at the improv, and he firmly told himself to calm down as he blotted at the tablecloth, glancing upwards to see Emma wriggling out of her summer jacket, pushing her shoulders back and her chest forward in that way that women do without realising the ache they cause.”

— David Nicholls

180. “And there it is again, the look. There’s no doubt about it, if Sylvie had a receipt, she would have taken him back by now; this one’s gone wrong. It’s not what I wanted.”

— David Nicholls

181. “In fact he was rather boring on the subject, but I kept quiet and took comfort in that old saying about fallen apples and their distance from trees.”

— David Nicholls

182. “For Stephen, London was less a city that never slept, more a city that got a good nine hours.”

— David Nicholls

183. “What was the point of being successful in private?”

— David Nicholls

184. “Why, I wondered, did people seek out portrayals of the very experiences that, in real life, would send them mad with despair? Shouldn’t art be an escape, a laugh, a comfort, a thrill?”

— David Nicholls

185. “Perhaps all families have these fleeting moments when, without ever saying as much, they take each other in and think, we work and we fit together and we love each other, and if we can remain like this, all will be fine.”

— David Nicholls

186. “Dads had favourite armchairs in which they sat like starship captains, issuing orders and receiving cups of tea and shouting at the news without fear of contradiction.”

— David Nicholls

187. “But like my dad used to say, the crucial thing about an education is the opportunity that it brings, the doors it opens, because otherwise knowledge, in and of itself, is a blind alley, especially from where I’m sitting.”

— David Nicholls

188. “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.’ ‘He doesn’t want to be a pop star, he wants to take photographs.’ ‘My point still stands. It is simply not true that you can achieve anything if you love it enough – it just isn’t. Life has limitations and the sooner he faces up to this fact then the better off he’ll be!”

— David Nicholls

189. “The truth is that my heart felt like a fist trying to punch its way though my rib-cage – not from the excitement of it all, though it was thrilling, but from a sense that finally, finally something good was about to happen to me. I felt the proximity of change, and I had wanted more than anything for something in my life to change. Is it still possible to feel like that, I wonder? Or does it only happen to us once?”

— David Nicholls

190. “Maybe if you listen to Radio 4 enough from an early age, you just get educated subliminally.”

— David Nicholls

191. “Okay then, smile and...”

— David Nicholls

192. “And there it was. She’d said it and now I could say it back, the most banal and brilliant exchange of dialogue, which we’d repeat, over and over, for just as long as we meant it.”

— David Nicholls