David Nicholls Quotes

You can't throw away years of your life because it makes a funny anecdote.

The fact was I loved my wife to a degree that I found impossible to express, and so rarely did.

I love Billy Wilder, and I love the way that his films can be very touching and very moving and very romantic, and at the same time there's always a little cynical undertone, there's always something that undercuts things.

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.

She used to pride herself on her refusal to see two sides of an argument, but increasingly she accepts that issues are more ambiguous and complicated than she once thought.

Most of the books and films I love walk a knife edge between romance and cynicism, and I wanted 'One Day' to stay on that line. I wanted it to be moving, but without being manipulative.

but they had also settled into the maddening familiarity of friendship; maddening for her at least.

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.

At some point you’ll have to get serious about life.

If she does have a failing, and it's obviously only a tiny one, it's that she doesn't seem particularly curious about other people, or me, anyway.

And then she frowned, and shook her head, then put her arms around him once more, pressing her face into his shoulder, making a noise that sounded almost like rage. 'What's up?' he asked. 'Nothing. Oh, nothing. Just...' She looked up at him. 'I thought I'd finally got rid of you.' 'I don't think you can.' he said

[He] didn’t like to think of himself as vain, but there were definitely times when he wished there was someone on hand to take his photograph.

You must do what you enjoy.

In the future, I'll be braver, she told herself. In the future, I will always speak my mind, eloquently, passionately.

She made you decent, and in return you made her so happy

And you stupid, stupid woman, stupid for caring, stupid for thinking that he cared.

I love him, she thought. I'm just not in love with him and also I don't love him. I've tried, I've strained to love him but I can't. I am building a life with a man I don't love, and I don't know what to do about it.

Oh you know me. I have no emotions. I'm a robot. Or a nun. A robot nun.

Maybe we've grown out of each other.

I think probably I'm quite sentimental; I like big emotional stories, I like being moved by things, but I think I'm very embarrassed by sentiment. I'm very embarrassed by corniness.

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.

Time to tidy up your life. Time to start again.

Salmon. Salmon, salmon, salmon, salmon. I eat so much salmon at these weddings, twice a year I get this urge to swim upstream.

Sometimes, when it is going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationary.

I want my best friend back, she thinks, because without him nothing is good and nothing is right.

Just kidding' was exactly what people wrote when they meant every word.

Occasionally, very occasionally, say at four o’clock in the afternoon on a wet Sunday, she feels panic-stricken and almost breathless with loneliness. Once or twice she has been known to pick up the phone to check that it isn’t broken. Sometimes she thinks how nice it would be to be woken by a call in the night: ‘get in a taxi now’ or ‘I need to see you, we need to talk’. But at the best of times she feels like a character in a Muriel Spark novel – independent, bookish, sharp-minded, secretly romantic.

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.

People change, no use getting sentimental about it. Move on, find someone else.

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.

I think reality is over-rated

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?

And of course there is always joy in witnessing the joy of others

The future rose up ahead of her, a succession of empty days, each more daunting and unknowable than the one before her.

Work hard at . . . something.