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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: 58
Born: 1966
Born: November 30
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Eastleigh Town
Keen
Prose
Opposed
Dialogue
Anything
Better
Writing

More quotes by 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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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.
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Dexter, I love you so much. So, so much, and I probably always will. I just don't like you anymore. I'm sorry.
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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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You start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it's enough to tell a few good jokes.
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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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 . . . .
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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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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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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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So - whatever happened to you?' 'Life. Life happened.
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 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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She was reaching the limits of how much its possible to change a man
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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But how can you not like music? That's the same as not liking food! Or sex!
David Nicholls
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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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I suppose the important thing is to make some sort of difference.
David Nicholls
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I'm not the consolation prize, Dex. I'm not something you resort to. I happen to think I'm worth more than that.
David Nicholls
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David Holdaway was my stage name. I was an actor for about eight years in the '90s. I had to change my name because there was another David Nicholls, and I thought if I changed it to my mother's name, she'd be touched.
David Nicholls