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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.

David Nicholls

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David Nicholls
Age: 57
Born: 1966
Born: November 30
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Eastleigh Town
Writing
Keen
Prose
Opposed
Dialogue
Anything
Better

More quotes by 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.
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Fear and anxiety are great motivators for me.
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Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved, if you ever get the chance
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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.
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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.
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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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As new dawns go, this one is depressingly like the old dawn.
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But how can you not like music? That's the same as not liking food! Or sex!
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…and Emma felt another small portion of her soul fall away.
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…surprised all over again at how very comforting very bad food can be.
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This isn't a letter, it's a gift.
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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.
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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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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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She made a firm resolution, one of the resolutions she was making almost daily these days. No more sleepovers, no more writing poetry, no more wasting time. Time to tidy up your life. Time to start again.
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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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No, friends were like clothes: fine while they lasted but eventually they wore thin or you grew out of them.
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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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Welcome to the graveyard of ambition.
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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