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From an evolutionary point of view, most emotions - fear, desire, anger - serve some practical purpose, but nostalgia is a useless, futile thing because it is a longing for something that is permanently lost . . . .

David Nicholls

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David Nicholls
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: November 30
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Eastleigh Town
Thing
View
Nostalgia
Something
Emotion
Practicals
Views
Practical
Purpose
Longing
Point
Useless
Desire
Emotions
Futile
Fear
Serve
Permanently
Lost
Anger
Evolutionary

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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.
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To have had fame, even very minor fame, and to have lost it, got older and maybe put on a little weight is a kind of living death.
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This is where it all begins. Everything starts here, today.
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The fact was I loved my wife to a degree that I found impossible to express, and so rarely did.
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A joke was not a single-use item but something you brought out again and again until it fell apart in your hand like a cheap umbrella.
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I suppose the important thing is to make some sort of difference.
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So - whatever happened to you?' 'Life. Life happened.
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I applied for the University of Life. Didn't get the grades.
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She glanced across to where Tilly and her brand new husband were posing for photographs, Tilly fluttering a fan coquettishly in front of her face. 'Unfortunately I didn't realise there was a French Revolutionary theme.' 'The Marie-Antoinette thing?' said Dexter. 'Well at least we know there'll be cake.
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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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Better by far to be good and courageous and bold and to make difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you
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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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I'm trying to be inspiring! I'm trying to lift your grubby soul for the great adventure that lies ahead of you!
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If you have to keep a secret it's because you shouldn't be doing it in the first place
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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 future rose up ahead of her, a succession of empty days, each more daunting and unknowable than the one before her.
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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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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.
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She shouldn't speak her thoughts nothing good ever came of speaking your thoughts.
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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.
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