John Niven Quotes

One thing you'll learn when you're in the business of selling utter shite to the Great British Public is that there's really no bottom to where they'll go. Shit food, shit TV, shit bands, shit films, shit houses. There is absolutely no fucking bottom with this stuff. The shittier you can make it - a bad photocopy of a bad photocopy of what was a shit idea in the first place - the more they'll eat it up with a big fucking spoon, from dawn till dusk, from now until the end of time. It's too good.

— John Niven

“As for school, well, the only kids who read books for pleasure, who read outside of when a teacher was literally standing over them in the classroom, were the freaks. The kids like ... like him. Docherty. The Professor. Strange and unexpected then when I discovered under Mr Cardew's encouragement that what seemed to me to be tracts of boredom and torture actually contained un imaginable vistas, entire worlds of escape. (And you were much in need of escape then, weren't you?) That you could open one of them and start turning the pages and that, instead of time slowing down and refusing to pass, you would look up at the clock (that clock, in its mesh cage) and the deadly, endless afternoon ahead of you would have vanished.”

— John Niven

“He thinks for a long time, about injustice, cruelty and the almighty dollar. About hypocrisy and power ballads. About ego, ambition and politics. The usual reasons stuff got done down here. Jesus looks at the glass, at the hateful, grieving faces, and speaks softly towards the microphone. 'When the truth of all this comes out none of you should be too hard on yourselves. You ... I mean, the Bible's mostly a crock, but there's no other way to say this, folks ... you know not what you did. Just try and remember,' he smiles, 'be nice.”

— John Niven

The notion of children makes me ill. The thought of having one ... when you see those guys in the supermarket, wheeling the trolley around while their brats whine and wheedle and some blundering sow questions every little thing they take off the shelves. I mean, just the fucking idea of it, the very word: family. Whenever I see it, on travel brochures, on house schedules ... I feel sick.

— John Niven

“I do not understand the festival experience. These people, these disgusting lowlifes we're driving through, they fought to get in here. They think they're lucky. They spent hours on the phone trying to get tickets, happily paying hundreds of pounds for a pair when they managed to find some. Now they're celebrating being here, celebrating the fact that they can lie around in urine-flavoured mud drinking warm lager and eating burgers prepared by some syphilitic gyppo while fucking Cast knock out their greatest hits in the distance.”

— John Niven

No!' I say. (I thought about saying 'NO!', but then I thought, no.)

— John Niven

“You realise that people actually have to live in among all this and that east London is the bill, the tab that these cunts are picking up so that you can live in west London.”

— John Niven

“Quite a place to be, that. When there's no one to tell you not to have another drink.”

— John Niven

“And he had offended love. Fuck him ragged had Kennedy offended love.”

— 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

“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

“I love watching the Oscars and seeing everybody saying all that 'it's an honour just to be nominated' rubbish. Then you see their faces when the split screen comes up as the winner is announced - the losers are all smiling through gritted teeth and looking as if they just swallowed half a pound of soor plooms.”

— John Niven

“Whenever someone like a plumber or a mechanic tries to explain something technical to me, I listen for about three seconds before it all just becomes white noise, like Charlie Brown's teacher.”

— John Niven

I do often feel that the single greatest thing about my job is that I don't have a boss. I'm like an overweight Han Solo: I take orders from just one person - me.

— John Niven

“I don't do sports, and my idea of hell is being dragged around ruins/museums/famous buildings, so I guess I'm a beach bum.”

— John Niven

“I go to the Caribbean for a month every January with hand baggage only. All you need is a passport and a credit card.”

— John Niven

I love being a writer. I have a great life. I get up in the morning and pad around in my dressing gown and listen to Radio 4.

— John Niven

I use computers and the Internet every day of my life, and yet I have absolutely no idea how they work. I'm like a labrador watching 'The Matrix.'

— John Niven

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

— John Niven

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

— John Niven

A novel I read when I was about 17 or 18 - 'The World According to Garp,' by John Irving - really made me want to become a writer. The character of Garp is a novelist, and at the time, the whole lifestyle of being a writer was hugely appealing to me.

— 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

“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

“Future generations of economists will look at the trickle-down theory in much the same way we now look at witch burning, slavery, and the Sinclair C5.”

— John Niven

“I am, it is safe to say, not a practical man. The few attempts I've made to hammer in a nail have ended in broken thumbs, burst pipes, and water spraying everywhere with the house on fire.”

— 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 do find the sight of small children eating very moving. Watch the way their tiny fingers clamp the cutlery. The exaggeratedly precise way they move cups or glasses to their lips.”

— John Niven

“I had left the music industry at the end of 2001, after 10 years, and had spent three years writing every single day - producing two unpublished novels, one abandoned novel, and three unproduced screenplays. The word 'no' and I were on more than nodding terms. The word 'no' and I were talking about going on holiday together.”

— 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

I love England. I live and work here. My children have grown up here. I see no conflict between this and praying that my countrymen in Scotland never have to live another day under Conservative rule from London.

— John Niven

“I love my children and care greatly for their future. If they decide they just want to loaf around for a bit between the ages of 16 and 25, that's perfectly fine by me. I did it, and I'm doing fine, thanks. Sometimes 'leaving kids to their own devices' is the best thing for them.”

— John Niven

I love Twitter, and my little corner of it is heavily weighted in favour of women, many of them writers: Caitlin Moran, India Knight, Lauren Laverne, Grace Dent, Deborah Orr, Marina Hyde, Suzanne Moore. I look at that list of names and think, 'Here comes the fun - fun that knows its way around a dictionary.'

— John Niven

I quite like the Queen. Now, this must come as a fairly amazing statement for someone who is avowedly left wing, pro-independence and anti-monarchy, but there you go.

— John Niven

“I understand that some people like certain things more than others, but by the time you are an adult, you really should be able to sit down and eat pretty much anything.”

— John Niven

“I was on the dole once. I loved it. It was only for a couple of years, when I was 20 or 21 and playing in a band. Back then, this was something young folk did - you got your rent paid, a little bit of money to live on, and you loafed around, wrote songs, rehearsed and dreamed of playing Wembley Stadium.”

— John Niven

“I wound up becoming an A&R man at London Records in the 1990s, during the boom of Britpop, the last great gold rush of the music industry. I saw incredible greed and terrible behaviour. I was greedy and terribly behaved.”

— John Niven

“I'm something of a black belt at break-ups. I have had two long-term relationships in my life, both of 10 years, both resulting in children, and both very much over. Things end. It is how you manage them being over that's key.”

— John Niven

“If pushed to say what I like about Elizabeth, who, as I'm sure most of you know, overtook Queen Victoria this week to become our longest-serving monarch, it would be her uncomplaining, getting-on-with-it ethic.”

— 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

“If you're one of the hundreds of thousands of people out there toiling over your unpublished manuscript, trying to make your way across that vast ocean in a bathtub, I can only say this to you: keep paddling. Well, either that or start vlogging.”

— John Niven

“In the end, being the writer on set is a bit like having organised a big party, but you're not allowed to eat or drink anything. You just have to stand in the corner.”

— John Niven

“It wasn't until my teenage years that a book really left a mark, and that was George Orwell's 'Nineteen Eighty-Four.' It was on the syllabus at school when I was about 16, and I went on to read more of his books. It was the height of the Cold War, so a lot of the messages really resonated at the time.”

— 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

“Non-Muslims in Saudi Arabia can only celebrate Valentine's Day behind closed doors. Apparently, this has led to a huge black market for flowers and wrapping paper.”

— 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

“The last time I saw Dad alive, he was in the hospital. He was watching 'Hell Drivers,' a crummy B-movie about truckers, on TV and reading the 'Daily Record.' This seems scarcely believable, but I actually said, 'Dad, you've not got long to go - don't you think you should be imbibing the culture a bit more?'”

— 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

“There were some summers when every boy in Ayrshire seemed to be playing golf, and my dad taught me. But he was a terrible teacher - of everything. Learning to drive with him almost killed me. He was the world's most impatient man - awful short fuse.”

— 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

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