John Niven Quotes
The first book I bought with my own money as a teenager was Martin Amis's 'Money.' You know that thing when you read a book and you think, 'I'm going to have to read every word ever written by this man.'
Quotes to Explore
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Don't assume that the answers are out there in the form of somebody else already doing something. Sometimes they are. But you have to think beyond that.
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I'm awful with directions, and I'm not very handy around the house.
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I don't try to sugarcoat things, but I also think my books make positive statements about the people and values in small-town America.
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If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.
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Insight enables you make sure you don't allow negative beliefs to get permanently set in your thinking - just the same way you wouldn't want fractured bones to be permanently set into place.
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I'm consistently telling stories about the value of the human condition and connectedness and things like that.
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I have never spoken to Eminem. I've never even spoken to him once.
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If I like a thing, it just sticks after once reading it or hearing it.
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The three theater peeps I would love to dine with are Mel Brooks, because he is so funny; Stephen Sondheim, because he is a god-like genius; and Ethel Merman, to compare notes on fabulous belting.
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Every project has to stand on its own. It's a different identity within each project, and I feel like that's the way it should be.
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I can go to a country song, go right into it and make it sound authentic. And I think that's because of my ear as an impressionist.
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Animation is different from other parts. Its language is the language of caricature. Our most difficult job was to develop the cartoon's unnatural but seemingly natural anatomy for humans and animals.
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I was always kind of florid. And full of rhetoric. That was my flaw. My whole time writing, I've had to work against that because it can be a wrecking posture.
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I've always gone for the more sensitive, bookish guy, totally. The jock boys, the sporty guys, I don't know... they just didn't do it for me.
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The only competition worthy of a wise man is with himself.
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I've written a screenplay that is a series of monologues and songs; they form this sort of human tapestry across time and place. The form is strange, but I find it really fascinating.
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I can't deal with someone flashy. That's so not me.
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I didn't understand key signatures or anything, you know. I'd say silly things at the top of a trumpet part like, 'Note, when you play B naturals, make the B naturals a half step lower because they sound funny if they're B naturals.' And some guy said: 'Idiot, just put a flat on the third line and it's a key signature, you know?'
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Developing our sympathetic compassion is not only possible but the only reason for us to be here on earth.
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That hunger of the flesh, that longing for ease, that terror of incarceration, that insistence on tribal honour being obeyed: all of that exists, and it exists everywhere.
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The town of St. Charles near St. Louis was founded by a trapper named Blanchette. There is a section that's called Frenchtown on historical markers.
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When you direct a movie that makes no money whatsoever, there is no rush to your door for the next one.
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Some people are money hungry and don't stop to think of who they're affecting and what really matters. There's a lot of ugly.
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The first book I bought with my own money as a teenager was Martin Amis's 'Money.' You know that thing when you read a book and you think, 'I'm going to have to read every word ever written by this man.'
