382 Quotes by David Nicholls

Then they kiss again, and she goes to work, and he goes to work, and so the days go by, faster than ever.

Our biographies involve each other so intrinsically now that we’re both on nearly every page. We know the answers because we were there, and so curiosity becomes hard to maintain; replaced, I suppose, by nostalgia.

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.

She was always going to be the smartest, kindest, funniest, loyalest person we would ever meet, and the fact of her not being here well it just isn’t right.

The problem with telling people that they can do anything they want to do is that it is objectively, factually inaccurate. Otherwise the whole world would just be ballet dancers and pop stars.’ ‘He doesn’t want to be a pop star, he wants to take photographs.’ ‘My point still stands. It is simply not true that you can achieve anything if you love it enough – it just isn’t. Life has limitations and the sooner he faces up to this fact then the better off he’ll be!

I identified with Pip from ‘Great Expectations,’ especially when I was younger; I had the same kind of gaucheness and uncertainty.

You start out wanting to change the world through language, and end up thinking it’s enough to tell a few good jokes.

Perhaps all families have these fleeting moments when, without ever saying as much, they take each other in and think, we work and we fit together and we love each other, and if we can remain like this, all will be fine.

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.