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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

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David Nicholls
Age: 57
Born: 1966
Born: November 30
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Eastleigh Town
Enough
Good
Wanting
Thinking
Jokes
World
Start
Language
Tell
Ends
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More quotes by David Nicholls

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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.
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So - whatever happened to you?' 'Life. Life happened.
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Mortified at the speed with which intimacy evaporates.
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This is where it all begins. Everything starts here, today.
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I suppose the important thing is to make some sort of difference.
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Well, I don't think Hollywood's a dirty word at all, I love a lot of Hollywood films.
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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?
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Dont run before you can walk
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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.
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At university, I used to write silly little sketches and monologues, but never fiction.
David Nicholls
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...and once again Dexter is struck by how easy conversation can be when no-one is in their right mind
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I'm not the consolation prize, Dex. I'm not something you resort to. I happen to think I'm worth more than that.
David Nicholls
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Whatever happens tomorrow, we had today and I'll always remember it
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She drinks pints of coffee and writes little observations and ideas for stories with her best fountain pen on the linen-white pages of expensive notebooks. Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery.
David Nicholls
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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.
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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
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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
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…and Emma felt another small portion of her soul fall away.
David Nicholls
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A screenplay is really an instruction manual, and it can be interpreted in any number of ways. The casting, the choice of location, the costumes and make-up, the actors' reading of a line or emphasis of a word, the choice of lens and the pace of the cutting - these are all part of the translation.
David Nicholls
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Welcome to the graveyard of ambition.
David Nicholls