David Quantick – författare

Following the phenomenal success of ‘Grumpy Old Men’, and ‘Grumpy Old Men on Holiday’, the guru of grump, David Quantick, takes a stand for miserable slobs everywhere against the self-help motivational mafia and keep-fit claptrap. The ultimate in stress-relief for the 21st-Century Grouch.Are you an irritable, crabby, cantankerous, malcontented old grump? Well relax, because you're not alone.Do you feel that the best way to cleanse your aura is to have trains that run on time, rather than “detoxing” with soybean-curd and shots of wheat germ, and that banning novelty mobile phone ring-tones would balance your chakras better than a course of crystal and hot-stones healing?If it is an intolerance of other people, rather than glucose, that gives you irritable bowel syndrome, and a gin and tonic soothes your karma better than ginseng and tofu ever could, then this book is for you.Apathetic malcontents unite! It’s time to roll up your yoga mats and use as draft excluders, line the cat’s litter tray with your organic, macrobiotic muesli, put your feet up on your “abs-crunching” exercise ball and make only ONE Resolution for the New year: to be grumpier and more bloody miserable than ever.

Following the phenomenal success of Grumpy Old Men, the quintessential grumpy old man, David Quantick, has taken a well-deserved holiday. But no matter where you go, there is always something to moan about.You're stuck behind endless caravans on the M4, waiting for a non-existent filthy train, hanging around looking at crap luggage in an airport. Is it going to be worth the effort? Of course is b****y well isn't.David Quantick here explores everything that makes the rest of the world different – and therefore worse – than Britain and lets us know exactly why it is safer to stay at home than to become grumpy old men on holiday. The indispensable guide to the grumpy old xenophobe in us all.

We can all name the classic rock and pop albums of the last fifty years. But what about the great lost albums? The albums that fell behind the back of the musical sofa? The albums that, in a very real sense, have been completely made up by the authors of this book?It took a bestselling crime writer or three to hunt down these fifty lost classics, and an award-winning TV comedy scriptwriter to buy them a pint and make them write it. From the 60s to the 00s, with track listings and full histories, Great Lost Albums reveals the recordings that - just perhaps - never existed, but really should have done. Albums include:· Bob Dylan's legendary collaboration with Liberace· Joy Division's 'musical theatre' period· Coldplay's IKEA Sessions, including 'Conscious Uncoupling (See Leaflet for Details)' and 'In my Place (There's a Lovely HEMNES Shelving System)'· The Who's magisterial, abandoned rock opera 'Bingo Wizard' · Kraftwerk's hastily deleted Christmas album, featuring the melancholic classic 'I Wish to Return this Item'...and many, many more.

Eddie Izzard - action transvestite, boy racer and male tomboy - spent the 1990s conquering Britain. As the decade ended, he looked further afield. "Dressed To Kill", his stand-up tour, saw him transport his high heels and off-the-shoulder numbers to New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, taking a natural comedian's delight in the differences separating the two sides of the Pond. In this book, he reflects on his birth in Yemen and his childhood in Northern Ireland, Wales and London, and muses on animals, male tomboys, street theatre, sex, crime, God, "The Great Escape", Bible stories starring Sean Connery and James Mason, and cats who dig for oil. He also reflects on the trials and tribulations of being an cross-dressing, surrealist comedian intent on making it in America.

How To Write Everything is the ultimate writer’s handbook. It tells you about every aspect of writing, from having an idea to getting the idea out into the world and getting paid for it, too. It covers everything from journalism to screen-writing, from speeches to sketches, from sitcoms to novels. With thirty years' experience as an award-winning script-writer, journalist, author and broadcaster David Quantick is ideally suited, as a writer, to write this definitive writer's guide to writing... everything.David Quantick is part of the writing team for HBO's multi-award winning show Veep. He has recently won the 2015 Emmy Awards for Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series.

How To Be A Writer is a collection of interviews with famous writers, performers and industry insiders that takes the reader through a writer’s day, from getting up to giving in. And, along the way, asks: When do you get ideas? When should you write? How do you deal with your money? Who do you have lunch with? And how do you keep going?Featuring JON RONSON, EMMA DONOGHUE, DENNIS KELLY, CAITLIN MORAN, JASON HAZELEY, JOEL MORRIS, SUZANNE MOORE, CATHERINE ROSENTHAL, MARK ELLEN, JOHN PANTON, JO UNWIN, MARTYN WAITES, MARK BILLINGHAM, ISZI LAWRENCEDavid Quantick is an Emmy-winning television writer and the author of the best-selling writing manual How To Write Everything. He has written for television in the USA (Veep) and the UK (The Thick Of It, Brass Eye, Harry Hill’s TV Burp), and is also a radio broadcaster (The Blagger’s Guide, 52 First Impressions), author (The Mule, Sparks) and a journalist who’s written for over 50 different publications, from the Daily Telegraph to The Dandy.

'Best quiz book ever'HARRY HILL'Quantick is the Captain Beefheart of quizzing'MARK BILLINGHAM'The antidote to every deathly dull pub quiz you've ever been to. This is how a quiz book should be written - where having fun is the most important outcome'GARY WIGGLESWORTH, author of The Book Lover's Quiz BookDistinctive, unusual, difficult, but spectacularly entertaining, this quiz book is to other pub quizzes what Trivial Pursuit was to Ludo, what The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is like to the Rhyl phone directory, and what the Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost is like compared to a kid's scooter. Loads better.David Quantick works regularly with Armando Iannucci, including on the new HBO series, Avenue 5. He won an Emmy as part of the writing team on Veep, a BAFTA for Harry Hill's TV Burp and a Writers' Guild Award for The Thick of It. For over fifteen years, David has also hosted his own very popular quizzes at festivals, events, pubs, clubs, cinemas and in tents: the quizzes range is broad and the questions are tricky. They're not about statistics, there's no sport, the picture rounds are conceptual, and there's sometimes a round called 'Martin Amis Character or Blur Song'. Each quiz is funny and entertaining even if you don't know the answers. The quizzes are informative and opinionated. In some ways, they're like stand-up with questions. This is a book based on David's excellent live quizzes, described by many people as 'quite difficult'.But they are quizzes. Quite difficult quizzes that tax the brain and make it go in directions it didn't know it could. That's not to say the questions are fiendishly scientific and packed with questions about dates and the periodic table. They're about books and music, movies and actors, strange events and interesting quotes. You don't leave a Quantick quiz knowing how many times Spurs have won the League, but you may know how many Shirleys have sung a Bond theme or how George V made the front page of The Times.The effectiveness of David's quizzes is down to their unusual variety and almost stream-of-consciousness leaps and bounds of factual imagination. There's not even much point in cheating, because the answers often require mental agility as well as just knowing where Calais is (it's in France, but it wasn't always, even when it was).David's quiz book includes twenty-five main quizzes, four Christmas quizzes and four specialist quizzes, so thirty-three quizzes in total. Entertaining in its own right, this is also a conceptual yet very practical guide to staging excellent quizzes of your own.

This is a collection of short stories. Some of them are very short, some of them are even shorter than that, and a few are quite long. What they all have in common is that they are a bit odd. There's science fiction, there's horror, there's at least one fairy tale, and there are some Christmas stories, not all of which are heart-warming. None of them are entirely conventional.David wrote all of these stories for his own entertainment, He wrote them to see if he could write them, or because he had an interesting idea, or because he wanted to see what would happen if the dead could talk to us through car stereos, if gerbils were cell phones, or if if time was an ocean.Now you can see what he sees, too. We hope you like it.You better. David knows people, and not all of them are very nice.

"David Quantick is one of the best kept secrets in the world of writing. He's smart, funny and unique. You should let yourself in on the secret."- Neil GaimanIt is March 1979 in DeKalb Illinois. Todd Milstead is a wannabe writer, a serial adulterer, and a jerk, only tolerated by his friends because he throws the best parties with the best booze. During one particular party, Todd is showing off his perfect recall, quoting poetry and literature word for word plucked from his eidetic memory. When he begins quoting from a book no one else seems to know, a novel called All My Colors, Todd is incredulous. He can quote it from cover to cover and yet it doesn't seem to exist. With a looming divorce and mounting financial worries, Todd finally tries to write a novel, with the vague idea of making money from his talent. The only problem is he can't write. But the book - All My Colors - is there in his head. Todd makes a decision: he will "write" this book that nobody but him can remember. After all, if nobody's heard of it, how can he get into trouble? As the dire consequences of his actions come home to both Todd and his long-suffering friends, it becomes clear that there is a high - and painful - price to pay for his crime."A morality tale, a comedy, a horror story rolled into one. All My Colors has it all."- The Sun"Really rich, funny, unsettling and just very alive. A brilliant premise executed with total confidence and authority."- John Niven, author of Kill Your Friends

From Emmy-award winning author David Quantick, Night Train is a science-fiction horror story like no other. A woman wakes up, frightened and alone - with no idea where she is. She's in a room but it's shaking and jumping like it's alive. Stumbling through a door, she realizes she is in a train carriage. A carriage full of the dead.This is the Night Train. A bizarre ride on a terrifying locomotive, heading somewhere into the endless night. How did the woman get here? Who is she? And who are the dead? As she struggles to reach the front of the train, through strange and horrifying creatures with stranger stories, each step takes her closer to finding out the train's hideous secret. Next stop: unknown.

From the Emmy Award-winning writer of Avenue 5, Veep and The Thick of It comes a funny, violent and thought-provoking horror story like nothing you've seen before.Ricky Smart is a nobody, a Miami Beach paparazzo who scrapes a living snapping celebs. One day Ricky wakes up and realises there's something wrong with his hand. It's not his hand. In fact, it's someone else's hand. How does he know it's not his? Because it looks different, feels different and - perhaps the biggest clue - has a four-letter word tattooed across the knuckles.But hey, it's still a hand, and it works just fine, so that's ok. Except a week later, his other hand changes. And a few days after that, Ricky gets a new arm...Ricky is losing his mind as well as his body parts, but he has to pay rent and those seedy photos aren't going to take themselves. The world needs candid shots of pop sensation and local girl Scala Jaq, almost as much as Ricky's bank account does. Yet Scala has a secret of her own, a secret that leads them to an unlikely partnership, the strangest support group ever, and revelations that threaten existence as they know it.It's up to the celebrity and her tormentor to work out what to do with a world of misfits, explosions, and other people's bad tattoos. Because when you've looked for redemption in all the right places, you might need to try the wrong ones.