Quote

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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David Nicholls
Age: 57
Born: 1966
Born: November 30
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Eastleigh Town
Thought
Whereas
Writing
Screen
Good
Screens
Always
Abstract
People
Image
Monologue
None
Monologues
Works
Internals
Process
Internal

More quotes by David Nicholls

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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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He's wearing his official university sweatshirt again, which puzzles me a little. I mean I'd sort of understand it more if it said Yale or Harvard or something, because then it would be a fashion choice. But why advertise the fact that you're at a university to all the other people who are at the university with you?
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I suppose the important thing is to make some sort of difference.
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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.
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If you're my friend I should be able to talk to you but I can't, and if I can't talk to you, well, what is the point of you? Of us?
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When I was an actor, I worked with lots of men who had a bit of success early on, who were very good looking, who suddenly made a bit of money and who felt no embarrassment - and nor should they have done - about having a good time.
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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.
David Nicholls
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So - whatever happened to you?' 'Life. Life happened.
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She had never been a proficient flirt. Her spasms of kittenish behaviour were graceless and inept, like normal conversation on roller skates. but the combination of the retsina and sun made Emma feel sentimental and light-headed. She reached for her roller skates.
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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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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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Welcome to the graveyard of ambition.
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When you're reading a book, you're always looking for the natural place to stop. With a movie, you can't really have that sense of it coming momentarily to a halt there's pressure to keep the momentum up.
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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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This isn't a letter, it's a gift.
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She realises that if she is to save the show she is going to have to improvise a rousing speech, one of the many Henry V moments that make up her working life.
David Nicholls
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The early days of any relationship are punctuated with a series of firsts - first sight, first words, first laugh, first kiss, first nudity, etc., with these shared landmarks becoming more widely spaced and innocuous as days turn to years, until eventually you're left with first visit to a National Trust property or some such.
David Nicholls
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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.
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 future rose up ahead of her, a succession of empty days, each more daunting and unknowable than the one before her.
David Nicholls