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I applied for the University of Life. Didn't get the grades.

David Nicholls

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David Nicholls
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: November 30
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Eastleigh Town
Grades
University
Didn
Life
Applied

More quotes by 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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Do you miss her?' 'Who? Emma? Of course. Every day. She was my best friend.
David Nicholls
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Were helping build capability and capacity in the new Iraqi Navy
David Nicholls
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These days grief seems like walking on a frozen river most of the time he feels safe enough, but there is always that danger that he will plunge through. Now he hears the ice creak beneath him, and so intense and panicking is the sensation that he has to stand for a moment, press his hands to his face and catch his breath.
David Nicholls
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Cuddling was for great aunts and teddy bears. Cuddling gave him cramp.
David Nicholls
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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
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Read a book at the right age and it will stay with you for life.
David Nicholls
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No, friends were like clothes: fine while they lasted but eventually they wore thin or you grew out of them.
David Nicholls
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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
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At university, I used to write silly little sketches and monologues, but never fiction.
David Nicholls
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We're not ourselves, are we? I'm certainly not myself, not anymore. And you're not either. You don't seem yourself. Not as I remember you.
David Nicholls
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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
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…and Emma felt another small portion of her soul fall away.
David Nicholls
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The future rose up ahead of her, a succession of empty days, each more daunting and unknowable than the one before her.
David Nicholls
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Better by far to be good and courageous and bold and to make difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you
David Nicholls
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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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Mortified at the speed with which intimacy evaporates.
David Nicholls
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I would never complain about One Day taking off but it made me painfully self-conscious for a long time.
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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I identified with Pip from 'Great Expectations,' especially when I was younger I had the same kind of gaucheness and uncertainty.
David Nicholls