Literary Birthday – 30 November – David Nicholls

Happy Birthday, David Nicholls, born 30 November 1966

Seven Quotes

1. I identified with Pip from Great Expectations, especially when I was younger; I had the same kind of gaucheness and uncertainty.
2. 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.
3. I usually write on a computer – unless I get stuck, at which point I switch to write by hand. I think that’s common among writers if they get cornered on something.
4. Read a book at the right age and it will stay with you for life.
5. For the best part of my childhood I visited the local library three or four times a week, hunching in the stacks on a foam rubber stool and devouring children’s fiction, classics, salacious thrillers, horror and sci-fi, books about cinema and origami and natural history, to the point where my parents encouraged me to read a little less.
6. A screenplay is really an instruction manual, and it can be interpreted in any number of ways. The casting, the choice of location, the costumes and make-up, the actors’ reading of a line or emphasis of a word, the choice of lens and the pace of the cutting – these are all part of the translation.
7. ‘Just kidding’ was exactly what people wrote when they meant every word.

David Nicholls is an English novelist and screenwriter. His novels include The Understudy and One Day. He has been twice nominated for BAFTA awards and his first novel, Starter for Ten was featured on the first Richard and Judy Book Club.

Source for Image

by Amanda Patterson

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