David Nicholls
David Nicholls
David Alan Nichollsis an English novelist and screenwriter...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth30 November 1966
silly writing fiction
At university, I used to write silly little sketches and monologues, but never fiction.
guarantees-that interesting skins
No matter how predictable, banal and listless the rest of my life might be, you can guarantee that there'll always be something interesting going on with my skin.
war drinking sadness
...maybe I've just read too many novels. In novels, alcoholics are always attractive and fuuny and charming and complex, like Sebastian Flyte or ABe North in Tender in the Night, and they're drinking because of a deep, unquenchable sadness of the soul, or the terrible legacy of the First World War, whereas I just get drunk because I'm thirsty, and I like the taste of lager...
dawn
As new dawns go, this one is depressingly like the old dawn.
growing-up worry people
All young people worry about things, it's a natural and inevitable part of growing up, and at the age of sixteen my greatest anxiety in life was that I'd never again achieve anything as good, or pure, or noble, or true, as my O-level results.
sex aunt cuddling
Cuddling was for great aunts and teddy bears. Cuddling gave him cramp.
found available
He has found himself more and more reliant on her at exactly the point that she has become less available to him.
be-good
Be good. Do something good.
navy helping capacity
Were helping build capability and capacity in the new Iraqi Navy
littles weight kind
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.
humor hands use
A joke was not a single-use item but something you brought out again and again until it fell apart in your hand like a cheap umbrella.
morning lying mean
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.
character widows-and-orphans expectations
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.
long remember reader
I've been a compulsive reader for as long as I can remember.