382 Quotes by David Nicholls

Well I can tell you now that married life is not a plateau, not at all. There are ravines and great jagged peaks and hidden crevasses that send the both of you scrabbling into darkness. Then there are dull, parched stretches that you feel will never end, and much of the journey is in fraught silence, and sometimes you can’t see the other person at all, sometimes they drift off very far away from you, quite out of sight, and the journey is hard. It is just very, very, very hard.

I suppose the important thing is to make some sort of difference.

What was the point of being successful in private?

Your last letter made me laugh so much, Em, but you should still get out of there because while it’s good for gags it’s definitely bad for your soul. You can’t throw years of your life away because it makes a funny anecdote.

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.

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.

Yet there seemed to be no easy correlation between the awful grief I felt at her death and our closeness – or lack of it – in life, and it occurred to me that perhaps grief is as much regret for what we have never had as sorrow for what we have lost.

Okay then, smile and...

Why, I wondered, did people seek out portrayals of the very experiences that, in real life, would send them mad with despair? Shouldn’t art be an escape, a laugh, a comfort, a thrill?