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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In a movie, you have to be mindful that no budget is going to be able to deal with running around the globe at every whim of the writer.
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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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Make the wise man within you your living ideal.
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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 have lots of shoes, but I have to be comfortable. Lately, I've stolen my husband's big, ugly Uggs to wear around the kitchen. I want to have them on, then slide into a fabulous heel later. Truth is, I often forget the heel.
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Once you lose attachment to how you want things to be because you realize you don't control anything, there's a curiously liberating aspect of that. I've always been a control freak, I've always felt that if I try hard enough, everyone I love will be kept safe and everything will be okay. Being shown, in such brutal terms, that that's simply not the way it works, in someways, it messed me up. I've been through hell, but on another level, if you pile up so much tragedy, it either destroys you, or you just start laughing about it. Because at the end of the day, no one gets out alive.
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In cross-country skiing, athletes propel themselves over distances of ten and twenty miles - a physical challenge that places intense demands on the ability of their red blood cells to deliver oxygen to their muscles.
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You have to be a romantic to invest yourself, your money, and your time in cheese.
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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.'
