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The Great Gatsby
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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

John Niven Quotes

I am very fortunate. I am a glass-half-full eternal optimist type to the point of being a moron. But I would never presume to know how hard it goes for others. How, for some people, just getting though the day is an incredible effort that can hardly be borne.

– John Niven

There are some sentences you cannot see yourself ever writing. ‘I heartily endorse the Conservative Party’ would be one. ‘I look forward to Justin Bieber’s new record’ would be another.

– John Niven

You know that thing where you repeat a word over and over until it just sounds like utter gibberish? That’s what doing a day of press on a film is like. Ten interviews in a row, all asking pretty much the same questions until you find yourself giving pretty much the same answers.

– John Niven

If you watch a group of schoolchildren eating lunch together, you cannot help but notice how it is a comically Lilliputian version of the adult thing – the cocked eyebrows of conversation, the reaching for condiments, the shovelling of food into tiny mouths.

– John Niven

I returned from my last L.A. visit to find myself tipping the scales like Homer Simpson when he tries to gain enough weight to qualify as disabled to be allowed to work from home. All I was missing was his kaftan and Fat Guy Hat. So, I decided it was time to diet.

– John Niven

I have an iPhone. I like it for the camera and the fact that you can have your email and Twitter and all that stuff in one place. However, unlike most men I know, I hate buying new technology.

– John Niven

Certainly in the case of ‘Kill Your Friends,’ a book I wrote more than 10 years ago, I routinely meet interviewers who appear to know the book better than I do. But still, you have to talk about it.

– John Niven

I remembered being young in the late ’70s and early ’80s and growing up at the height of the Cold War. I remembered how scared I was of nuclear weapons, how often I though about them and about the possibility of everything and everyone I knew vanishing in a second in temperatures hotter than the centre of the sun.

– John Niven

I can still remember my mum (a voracious, if not discriminating, reader – I have seen everything from the sublime to the ridiculous by her bed, from Ian Rankin and Elmore Leonard to Barbara Cartland and James Patterson) taking me to get my library card when I was four and not yet at school.

– John Niven

I’ve forgotten the birthdays of everyone close to me. I have forgotten to pay bills, file tax returns on time, go to meetings, and, every week, I forget to put the bins out. But I have never forgotten I want my lunch.

– John Niven

On one level, of course, the notion of judging films or books or music against each other is completely ridiculous. Who’s to say ’12 Years A Slave’ is a better film than ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’? Or that one album in a certain genre is better than another in a completely different genre?

– John Niven

I once worked at a record label called London Records. The company was owned by Roger Ames, one of the most successful figures in the British music industry. Roger always placed a value on loafing, on holidays, on not being in the office all the time.

– John Niven

Forget worrying about the break-up of celebrities you don’t even know. I have long since given up trying to figure out why even my closest friends split up.

– John Niven

Among the Internet’s many gains for humanity, decreasing paranoia has not been one of them. Anything from that lump under your armpit to what’s lurking in the sea – just type it into a search engine and watch your nerves explode.

– John Niven

From everything I can read about Aussie spiders, it seems like all they really like doing is hiding in your house or garden or car until you ‘accidentally’ disturb them – probably by doing something crazy like putting on the shoe they are lurking in – and they can officially bite you to pieces.

– John Niven

If you put a frog in boiling water, it’ll jump straight out. If you put it in cold water and gradually bring it to the boil, it’ll sit right there until it dies. Scotland has been sitting in England’s gradually boiling water for so long that many people are used to it.

– John Niven

The mechanic could lift up the bonnet of the car and show me four dwarves strapped to a pair of tandems and tell me that the motor was actually dwarf-powered and that one of the little fellows had to be replaced, and I’d just be numbly writing out a cheque and scribbling ‘new dwarf – car’ on the stub.

– John Niven

It’s one of the hardest things in the world to sustain a monogamous relationship for many years. People out there who have been with their partners for 30 years or more – I salute you. But it’s just as hard to admit something isn’t working and then try to manage a civilised separation as best as you can.

– John Niven

The sight of people sleeping on the streets hits us hardest around Christmas and New Year. We see them camped out alone on the freezing concrete, and we think, with a rush of guilt, about heading home to our families and our soft beds.

– John Niven

I’ve never understood why the end of a relationship – especially one involving children – has to immediately signal a descent into hatred and toxicity.

– John Niven

It’s tough being a dictator, but I’ve always thought it must be tougher being a hanger-on to a dictator. The late nights spent listening to his crazed ranting, the weary rictus grin from smiling at bad jokes, the draining knowledge that one misjudged comment could land you on the chopping block.

– John Niven

I have to confess to not being a great forward planner. I’m the kind of person who regularly arranges to have dinner with five different people on the same night.

– John Niven

There is a psychic cost children bear when they grow up in fear.

– John Niven

A novel, of course, is a fully self-contained work of art. You pick it up off the shelf, open it, and there it is – a whole universe waiting for you to enter. A screenplay is just a blueprint for making a movie. Until the movie is actually filmed, the script really means nothing.

– John Niven

I grew up in a council house in a poor Scottish town. I came of age during the recession of the mid-1980s when unemployment in my area reached 40 per cent.

– John Niven

When you are a novelist, you are used to making a narrative do what you want.

– John Niven

We live in a crazily youth-orientated world nowadays. It’s a trickle-down thing. We see pictures of lithe, attractive celebrity couples such as Brad and Angelina or the Beckhams cavorting around, covered in tattoos, stomachs as flat as the singing in early ‘X Factor’ rounds.

– John Niven

The Confederate flag was the flag of the American South during the civil war. It was the flag of people who were fighting against their own government in an attempt to retain slavery. It was the flag of people who thought slavery was no problem, who thought slavery was a good thing.

– John Niven

When I went into the computer shop to change my last laptop, the 19-year-old kid behind the counter looked at my six-year-old model and described it as ‘vintage.’ ‘Vintage?’ I wanted to scream. ‘Son, I’ve got shirts older than you! I own underpants that have seen more of the world!’

– John Niven

When my last relationship broke up, I bought a house one door along from my ex so that our daughter could continue to see as much of both of us as possible. This seems to me eminently sane and civilised.

– John Niven

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