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.
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 identified with Pip from ‘Great Expectations,’ especially when I was younger; I had the same kind of gaucheness and uncertainty.
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 work three days at home, and two days in the British Library or the London Library, just to get out of the house and hide from the children.
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.
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.
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.
If there’s anything I’m keen to get better at in my writing, then it’s the writing of prose as opposed to the writing of dialogue.
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.
This might sound really foolish, but when I came to Edinburgh in 1988 I had spent nearly all my life living south of Bristol, and I was just amazed that a city like Edinburgh was actually in the British isles.
Fear and anxiety are great motivators for me.
Afterward, there was some debate as to whether we’d actually “done it properly,” which gives you some idea of the awesome skill and artful dexterity of my lovemaking technique.
Were helping build capability and capacity in the new Iraqi Navy.
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.
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.
But how can you not like music? That’s the same as not liking food! Or sex!
It’s the face itself that I love, not that face at twenty-eight or thirty-four or forty-three. It’s that face.
I had always been led to believe that ageing was a slow and gradual process, the creep of a glacier. Now I realise that it happens in a rush, like snow falling off a roof.
I think I became a writer because I used to write letters to my friends, and I used to love writing them. I loved the idea that you can put marks on a page and send it off, and two days later, someone laughs somewhere else in the world.