Words matter. These are the best David Nicholls Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I read a lot of F. Scott Fitzgerald. I love ‘Tender is the Night,’ and its atmosphere of doomed romance. He was one of the greatest prose stylists, with a wonderfully clear but lyrical quality.
As a novelist, I’m incredibly lucky to make a living, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t lie awake at four o’clock in the morning, worrying.
I’ve only ever been recognised in the street once. In Sweden, strangely.
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.
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.
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.
Read a book at the right age and it will stay with you for life.
There’s no shortage of orphans in 19th-century literature, but it’s hard to find a single happy, communicative, functional parental relationship in the whole of ‘Great Expectations,’ even among the minor characters.
At university, I used to write silly little sketches and monologues, but never fiction.
An adaptation leads the cinema-goer to the original to find out what they’re missing and if they already know the book, it can still illuminate a theme, a character, an idea.
I usually write on a computer – unless I get stuck, at which point I switch to write by hand. I think that’s common among writers if they get cornered on something.
Well, it’s so hard for books to take off. You give years of your life to something that probably won’t happen, so when it does, it feels a little… unjust.
I worry sometimes that I’m a bit moralistic; always writing about men who are learning to grow up, not be so self-absorbed, selfish or badly behaved. I wonder if that’s dull and liberal and wimpy? I should probably write something that celebrates wickedness.
My 20s was a sea of worry. I worried about benefit forms, about being thrown out of my flat. I never went on holiday because I thought: ‘What if an audition comes up?’ I was a nervous wreck.
Fear and anxiety are great motivators for me.
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.
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.
I really was a terrible actor. I did it for years in my twenties because it was like being at university again.
