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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: 58
Born: 1966
Born: November 30
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Eastleigh Town
World
Start
Language
Tell
Ends
Change
Enough
Good
Wanting
Thinking
Jokes

More quotes by David Nicholls

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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?
David Nicholls
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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
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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
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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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If you have to keep a secret it's because you shouldn't be doing it in the first place
David Nicholls
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She was reaching the limits of how much its possible to change a man
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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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
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I am not up to this. I am not capable. I thought I would be, but I'm not. Some part of me is missing, and I cannot do this.
David Nicholls
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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
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At university, I used to write silly little sketches and monologues, but never fiction.
David Nicholls
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Whatever happens tomorrow, we had today and I'll always remember it
David Nicholls
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As new dawns go, this one is depressingly like the old dawn.
David Nicholls
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Screenwriting is always about what people say or do, whereas good writing is about a thought process or an abstract image or an internal monologue, none of which works on screen.
David Nicholls
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Were helping build capability and capacity in the new Iraqi Navy
David Nicholls
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I'm just not prepared to be treated like this anymore.' 'Treated like what?' She sighed, and it was a moment before she spoke. 'Like you always want to be somewhere else, with someone else.
David Nicholls
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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
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Fear and anxiety are great motivators for me.
David Nicholls
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Cuddling was for great aunts and teddy bears. Cuddling gave him cramp.
David Nicholls
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Welcome to the graveyard of ambition.
David Nicholls