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.'

John Niven

• Money
• Book
• Teenager

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Quotes to Explore

• 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.

  

  Abigail Johnson
  • Think
  • Sometimes
  • Doing

• I'm awful with directions, and I'm not very handy around the house.

  

  Taye Diggs
  • House
  • Very
  • Directions

• 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.

  

  Tawni O'Dell
  • People
  • America
  • Small

• 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.

  

  Ursula K. Le Guin
  • Writing
  • Kids
  • Die

• 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.

  

  Karen Salmansohn
  • Thinking
  • Want
  • Negative

• I'm consistently telling stories about the value of the human condition and connectedness and things like that.

  

  J. H. Wyman
  • Value
  • Things
  • Human

• I have never spoken to Eminem. I've never even spoken to him once.

  

  Bebe Rexha
  • Never
  • Him
  • Even

• If I like a thing, it just sticks after once reading it or hearing it.

  

  Abraham Lincoln
  • Reading
  • Like
  • Hearing

• 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.

  

  Nancy Allen
  • God
  • Love
  • Funny

• 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.

  

  Vince Staples
  • Different
  • Identity
  • Stand

• 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.

  

  Eddie Murphy
  • Country
  • Think
  • Song

• 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.

  

  Walt Disney
  • Different
  • Job
  • Language

• 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.

  

  Barry Hannah
  • Time
  • Work
  • Writing

• 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.

  

  Laura Ramsey
  • Guy
  • Know
  • Me

• The only competition worthy of a wise man is with himself.

  

  Washington Allston
  • Man
  • Wise
  • Competition

• 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.

  

  Patrick Wang
  • Time
  • Find
  • Strange

• I can't deal with someone flashy. That's so not me.

  

  Kate Bosworth
  • Me
  • Deal
  • Someone

• 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?'

  

  Quincy Jones
  • Guy
  • Funny
  • Silly

• Life is like an onion. You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.

  

  Carl Sandburg
  • Life
  • Time
  • Weep

• Revolutionaries see history as a creation of their own spirit, as being made up of a continuous series of violent tugs at the other forces of society - both active and passive, and they prepare the maximum of favourable conditions for the definitive tug (revolution).

  

  Antonio Gramsci
  • Up
  • History
  • Society

• I think we worry way too much about where books should fit inside genres. In a romance, the hero and heroine are on a journey together, and no matter how awful it gets, by the end of the book they'll be in love, with the probability of a happy ending.

  

  Marjorie Liu
  • Book
  • Together
  • Happy

• I think they thought it was very arrogant of me to write the end of my seven books series when I didn't have a publisher and no-one had heard of me

  

  Joanne Rowling
  • Thinking
  • Writing
  • Book

• Flattery, though a base coin, is the necessary pocket money at court; where, by custom and consent, it has obtained such a currency that it is no longer a fraudulent, but a legal payment.

  

  Bill Vaughan
  • Money
  • Currency
  • Flattery

• 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.'

  

  John Niven
  • Money
  • Book
  • Teenager