By the time Alfie is my age I will be long gone, or, best-case scenario, barricaded into my living module with enough rations to see out my days. But outside, I imagine vast, unregulated factories where workers count themselves lucky to toil through eighteen-hour days for less than a living wage before pulling on their gas masks to fight their way through the unemployed masses who are bartering with the mutated chickens and old tin-cans that they use for currency, those lucky workers returning to tiny, crowded shacks in a vast megalopolis where a tree is never seen, the air is thick with police drones, where car-bomb explosions, typhoons and freak hailstorms are so commonplace as to be barely remarked upon. Meanwhile, in the literally gilded towers above the carcinogenic smog, the privileged 1 percent of businessmen, celebrities and entrepreneurs look down through bullet-proof windows, accept cocktails in strange glasses from the robot waiters hovering nearby and laugh their tinkling laughs and somewhere, down there in that hellish, stewing mess of violence, poverty and desperation, is my son, Alfie Petersen, a wandering minstrel with his guitar and his keen interest in photography, still refusing to wear a decent coat.

— David Nicholls

Call me sentimental, but there's no-one in the world that I'd like to see get dysentery more than you

— David Nicholls

Can I say something?'' Go on''I'm a little drunk''Me too. That's okay.'' Just.... I missed you, you know.'' I missed you too.'' But so, so much, Dexter. There were so many things I wanted to talk to you about, and you weren't there-''same here.'' I tell you what it is. It's..... When I didn't see you, I thought about you every day, I mean EVERY DAY in some way or another-''same here.''-Even if it was just "I wish Dexter could see this" or "Where's Dexter now?" or "Christ that Dexter, what an idiot", you know what I mean, and seeing you today, well, I thought I'd got you back - my BEST friend. And now all this, the wedding, the baby- I'm so happy for you, DEX, but it feels like I've lost you again.'--'You know what happens you have a family, your responsibilities change, you lose touch with people''It won't be like that, I promise.'' Do you?'' Absolutely''You swear? No more disappearing?'' I won't if you won't.' Their lips touched now, mouths pursed tight, their eyes open, both of them stock still. The moment held, a kind of glorious confusion.

— David Nicholls

Cuddling was for great aunts and teddy bears. Cuddling gave him cramp.

— David Nicholls

Dexter, I love you so much. So, so much, and I probably always will.' Her lips touched his cheek. 'I just don't like you anymore. I'm sorry.

— David Nicholls

Dexter, I love you so much. So, so much, and I probably always will. I just don't like you anymore. I'm sorry.

— David Nicholls

Douglas, you have an incredible capacity for missing the point. Will you listen to me, just for once? The debate does not matter. It's not about the issues. Alfie might have been naive or ridiculous or pompous or all of those things, but you apologized. You said you were embarrassed by him. You took the side of a bunch of arms-dealers! Bloody bastard arms-dealers against your son - our son - and that was wrong, it was the wrong thing to do, because in a fight you side with the people you love. That's just how it is.

— David Nicholls

Every week seems to bring another luxuriantly creamy envelope, the thickness of a letter-bomb, containing a complex invitation – a triumph of paper engineering – and a comprehensive dossier of phone numbers, email addresses, websites, how to get there, what to wear, where to buy the gifts. Country house hotels are being block-booked, great schools of salmon are being poached, vast marquees are appearing overnight like Bedouin tent cities. Silky gray morning suits and top hats are being hired and worn with an absolutely straight face, and the times are heady and golden for florists and caterers, string quartets and Ceilidh callers, ice sculptors and the makers of disposable cameras. Decent Motown cover-bands are limp with exhaustion. Churches are back in fashion, and these days the happy couple are travelling the short distance from the place of worship to the reception on open-topped London buses, in hot-air balloons, on the backs of matching white stallions, in micro-lite planes. A wedding requires immense reserves of love and commitment and time off work, not least from the guests. Confetti costs eight pounds a box. A bag of rice from the corner shop just won’t cut it anymore.

— David Nicholls

Familiarity, globalization, cheap travel, mere weariness had diluted our sense of foreignness.

— David Nicholls

For his thirtieth birthday he had filled a whole nightclub off Regent Street; people had been queuing on the pavement to get in. The SIM card of his mobile phone in his pocket was overflowing with telephone numbers of all the hundreds of people he had met in the last ten years, and yet the only person he had ever wanted to talk to in all that time was standing now in the very next room.

— David Nicholls