…and Emma felt another small portion of her soul fall away.
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.
As soon as she’d met him at the arrivals gate on his return from Thailand, lithe and brown and shaven-headed, she knew that there was no chance of a relationship between them. Too much had happened to him, too little had happened to her.
As new dawns go, this one is depressingly like the old dawn.
I really was a terrible actor. I did it for years in my twenties because it was like being at university again.
From an evolutionary point of view, most emotions – fear, desire, anger – serve some practical purpose, but nostalgia is a useless, futile thing because it is a longing for something that is permanently lost . . . .
Screenwriting is always about what people say or do, whereas good writing is about a thought process or an abstract image or an internal monologue, none of which works on screen.
You can live your whole life not realizing that what you’re looking for is right in front of you.
For some time now she has had the conviction that life is about to change if only because it must. . . .
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.
I’ve only ever been recognised in the street once. In Sweden, strangely.
…and once again Dexter is struck by how easy conversation can be when no-one is in their right mind
