Starter for Ten Quotes

“Independence is the luxury of all those people who are too confident, and busy, and popular, and attractive to be just plain old lonely. And make no mistake, lonely is absolutely the worst thing to be. Tell someone that you've got a drink problem, or an eating disorder, or your dad died when you were a kid even, and you can almost see their eyes light up with the sheer fascinating drama and pathos of it all, because you've got an issue, something for them to get involved in, to talk about and analyse and discuss and maybe even cure. But tell someone you’re lonely and of course they’ll seem sympathetic, but look very carefully and you'll see one hand snaking behind their back, groping for the door handle, ready to make a run for it, as if loneliness itself were contagious. Because being lonely is just so banal, so shaming, so plain and dull and ugly.”
― David Nicholls, Starter for Ten

“I want to be able to listen to recording of piano sonatas and know who's playing. I want to go to classical concerts and know when you're meant to clap. I want to be able to 'get' modern jazz without it all sounding like this terrible mistake, and I want to know who the Velvet Underground are exactly. I want to be fully engaged in the World of Ideas, I want to understand complex economics, and what people see in Bob Dylan. I want to possess radical but humane and well-informed political ideals, and I want to hold passionate but reasoned debates round wooden kitchen tables, saying things like 'define your terms!' and 'your premise is patently specious!' and then suddenly to discover that the sun's come up and we've been talking all night. I want to use words like 'eponymous' and 'solipsistic' and 'utilitarian' with confidence. I want to learn to appreciate fine wines, and exotic liquers, and fine single malts, and learn how to drink them without turning into a complete div, and to eat strange and exotic foods, plovers' eggs and lobster thermidor, things that sound barely edible, or that I can't pronounce...Most of all I want to read books; books thick as brick, leather-bound books with incredibly thin paper and those purple ribbons to mark where you left off; cheap, dusty, second-hand books of collected verse, incredibly expensive, imported books of incomprehensible essays from foregin universities.

At some point I'd like to have an original idea...And all of these are the things that a university education's going to give me.”
― David Nicholls, Starter for Ten

“The sad fact is that I love Dickens and Donne and Keats and Eliot and Forster and Conrad and Fitzgerald and Kafka and Wilde and Orwell and Waugh and Marvell and Greene and Sterne and Shakespeare and Webster and Swift and Yeats and Joyce and Hardy, really, really love them. It’s just that they don’t love me back.”
― David Nicholls, Starter for Ten

“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.”
― David Nicholls, Starter for Ten

“As new dawns go, this one is depressingly like the old dawn.”
― David Nicholls, Starter for Ten

“What must that be like? To be admired before you’ve even said a word, to be desired two or three hundred times a day by people who have absolutely no idea what you’re like?”
― David Nicholls, Starter for Ten

“...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...”
― David Nicholls, Starter for Ten

“I applied for the University of Life. Didn't get the grades.”
― David Nicholls, Starter for Ten

“Alice doesn't seem to mind because she's laughing too, and biting her lip, all doe-eyed, and tossing her freshly washed hair, and Norton tosses his lovely, glossy hair back, and she tosses her hair in return, and he tosses his, and she tosses hers, and it;s like some mating ritual on a wildlife program.”
― David Nicholls, A Question of Attraction

“I contemplate the idea that maybe I'm an alcoholic. I get this occassionally, the need to define myself as something-or-the-other, and at various times in my life have wondered if I'm a Goth, a homosexul, a Jew, a Catholic or a manic depressive, whether I am adopted, or have a hole in my heart, or possess the ability to move objects with the power of my mind, and have always, most regretfully, come to the conclusion that I'm none of the above. The fact is I'm actually not ANYTHING.”
― David Nicholls, Starter for Ten

“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.”
― David Nicholls, Starter for Ten

“I can't believe it's actually happening. This is independent adulthood, this is what it feels like. Shouldn't there be some sort of ritual? In certain remote African tribes there'd be some incredible four day rites of passage ceremony involving tattooing and potent hallucinogenic drugs extracted from tree-frogs, and village elders smearing my body with monkey blood, but here,rites of passage is all about three new pairs of pants and stuffing your duvet in a bin-liner.”
― David Nicholls, Starter for Ten

“But the thing about Literature is, well, basically it encapsulates all the disciplines - it's history, philosophy, politics, sexual politics, sociology, psychology, linguistics, science. Literature is mankind's organised response to the world around him, or her.”
― David Nicholls, Starter for Ten

“it's rapidly becoming clear that the so-called best years of my life are never going to happen”
― David Nicholls, Starter for Ten

“Sometimes I wish that I hadn't learned how to crochet," I say, and Alice laughs. Obviously she thinks I'm joking, which is maybe for the best.”
― David Nicholls, Starter for Ten

“I admit it. I'd made some mistakes. Okay, some big mistakes. Loads of them. But you can't hide in your room forever feeling sorry for yourself. It's not practical. At some point, you've got to get back out there, face up to things, and confront your demons. Ever since I can remember, I'd wanted to be clever. Some people are born clever, same way some people are born beautiful. I'm not one of those people. I'm going to have to work at it, put in the effort, and if I mess it up, I'll learn from it. Besides, sometimes it's not about knowing the right answer. Sometimes it's about asking the right questions" - Starter for 10”
― David Nicholls, Starter for Ten

“You're not going to turn into a wanker, are you?" says Tone, opening a can of larger.

"What do you mean?"

"He means you're not going to get all studenty on us," says Spencer.

"Well, I am a student. I mean, I will be, so,..."

"No, but I mean you're not gong to get all twatty and up-your-own-arse and come home at Christmas in a gown, talking Latin and saying "one does" and "one thinks" and all that..."

"Yeah, Tone, that's EXACTLY what I'm going to do.”
― David Nicholls, Starter for Ten

“If she does have a failing, and it's obviously only a tiny one, it's that she doesn't seem particularly curious about other people, or me, anyway.”
― David Nicholls, A Question of Attraction

“unsettling, like seeing Stalin on a skateboard.”
― David Nicholls, Starter for Ten

“At some point, I'd like to have an origina l idea. And I'd like to be fancied, or maybe loved even, but I'll wait and see.”
― David Nicholls, Starter for Ten

“Whenever I hear Edith Piaf sing “Non, je ne regrette rien”—which is more often than I’d like, now that I’m at university—I can’t help thinking, What the hell is she talking about? I regret pretty much everything.”
― David Nicholls, A Question of Attraction

“At the end of the day, the harsh reality is that if you’re a fan of Kate Bush, Charles Dickens, Scrabble, David Attenborough and University Challenge, then there’s not much out there for you in terms of a youth movement.”
― David Nicholls, Starter for Ten

“The idea that someone, man or woman, should receive any kind of extra attention or affection or popularity or respect or adulation, simply because of a quirk of genetics and some arbitrary male-media-defined subjective notion of 'beauty' seems to me inherently wrong and unacceptable.”
― David Nicholls, Starter for Ten

“Às vezes era capaz de me fazer vomitar a mim próprio, a sério que sim.”
― David Nicholls, Starter for Ten

“But like my dad used to say, the crucial thing about an education is the opportunity that it brings, the doors it opens, because otherwise knowledge, in and of itself, is a blind alley, especially from where I'm sitting.”
― David Nicholls, Starter for Ten

“They say the personal is political and it's certainly fair to say that, like her politics, Rebecca Epstein's kissing is radical, forthright and uncompromising.”
― David Nicholls, Starter for Ten

“Maybe if you listen to Radio 4 enough from an early age, you just get educated subliminally”
― David Nicholls, Starter for Ten

“How would she fill the days? She had no idea. The trick of it, she told herself, is to be courageous and bold and make a difference. Not change the world exactly, just the bit around you. Go out there with your double first, your passion and your new Smith Corona electric typewriter and work hard at....something. Change lives through art maybe. Write beautifully. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved if at all possible. Eat sensibly. Stuff like that.”
― David Nicholls, Starter for Ten

“I get this occasionally, the need to define myself as a something-or-other, and at various times in my life I have wondered if I´m a Goth, a homosexual, a Jew, a Catholic or a manic-depressive, wheter I am adopted, or have a hole in my heart, or possess the ability to move objects with the power of my mind, and have always, mostly regretfully, come to conclusion that I´m none of the above. The fact is I´m actually not ANYTHING.”
― David Nicholls, Starter for Ten

“We go in and sit on the sofa by the fire to dry out, and she plays her favourite records, lots of Rickie Lee Jones and Led Zeppelin and Donovan and Bob Dylan - even though she was sixteen in 1982, there's definitely something very 1971 about Alice. I watch as she jumps around the room to 'Crosstown Traffic' by Jimi Hendrix, then when she's out of breath and tired of changing records every three minutes she puts a crackly old Ella Fitzgerald LP on, and we lie on the sofa and read our books, and steal glances at each other every now and then, like that bit between Michael York and Liza Minnelli in Cabaret, and talk only when we feel like it.”
― David Nicholls, Starter for Ten