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
People
Image
Monologue
None
Monologues
Works
Internals
Process
Internal
Thought
Whereas
Writing
Screen
Good
Screens
Always
Abstract

More quotes by 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
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Maybe we've grown out of each other.
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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And of course there is always joy in witnessing the joy of others
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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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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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.
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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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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She shouldn't speak her thoughts nothing good ever came of speaking your thoughts.
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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Work hard at . . . something.
David Nicholls
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Call me sentimental, but there's no-one in the world that I'd like to see get dysentery more than you
David Nicholls
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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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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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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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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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As new dawns go, this one is depressingly like the old dawn.
David Nicholls
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Salmon. Salmon, salmon, salmon, salmon. I eat so much salmon at these weddings, twice a year I get this urge to swim upstream.
David Nicholls
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I think I became a writer because I used to write letters to my friends, and I used to love writing them. I loved the idea that you can put marks on a page and send it off, and two days later, someone laughs somewhere else in the world.
David Nicholls