Quote

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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David Nicholls
Age: 57
Born: 1966
Born: November 30
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Eastleigh Town
Thinking
Joke
Jokes
Failure
Easier
Achieving
Achieve
Kick
Actually
Unhappiness
Make
Kicks
Think
Disappointed

More quotes by 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.
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The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell.
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Do you miss her?' 'Who? Emma? Of course. Every day. She was my best friend.
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Why can’t you just love me? Why can’t you just be in love with me?
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Once you decide not to worry about that stuff anymore, dating and relationships and love and all that, it's like you're free to get on with real life.
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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.
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I work three days at home, and two days in the British Library or the London Library, just to get out of the house and hide from the children.
David Nicholls
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He put one hand lightly on the back of her neck and simultaneously she placed one hand lightly on his hip, and they kissed in the street as all around them people hurried home in the summer light, and it was the sweetest kiss that either of them would ever know. This is where it all begins. Everything starts here, today. And then it was over.
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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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...and once again Dexter is struck by how easy conversation can be when no-one is in their right mind
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He has found himself more and more reliant on her at exactly the point that she has become less available to him.
David Nicholls
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Letters, like compilation tapes, were really vehicles for unexpressed emotions and she was clearly putting far too much time and energy into them.
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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.
David Nicholls
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[He] didn’t like to think of himself as vain, but there were definitely times when he wished there was someone on hand to take his photograph.
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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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
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you feel a little bit lost right now about what to do with your life, a bit rudderless and oarless and aimless but that's okay that's alright because we're all meant to be like that at twenty-four.
David Nicholls
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Work hard at . . . something.
David Nicholls
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It's hard to overestimate the teenage appetite for high drama.
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