382 Quotes by David Nicholls

Once you decide not to worry about that stuff anymore, dating and relationships and love and all that, it’s like you’re free to get on with real life.

I have always been well liked, I think, always well regarded and respected, but having few enemies is not the same as having many friends, and there was no denying that I was, if not “lonely”, more solitary than I’d hoped to be at that time.

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.

Lonely’ is a troubling word and not one to be tossed around lightly. It makes people uncomfortable, summoning up as it does all kinds of harsher adjectives, like ‘sad’ or ‘strange’. I have always been well liked, I think, always well regarded and respected, but having few enemies is not the same as having many friends, and there was no denying that I was, if not ‘lonely’, more solitary than I’d hoped to be at that time.

And then some days you wake up and everything’s perfect.

Then Emma Mayhew dies, and everything that she thought or felt vanishes and is gone forever.

I’ve only ever been recognised in the street once. In Sweden, strangely.

This, I thought, is why we have comfort zones, because they are comfortable. What can possibly be gained by leaving them?

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.