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" 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
Glasses
Eating
Small
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" 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
Up
Great
Life
" 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
Forward
Yourself
You
" Twitter is almost novelistic. "
John Niven
Almost
Twitter
" I cannot, will never, understand these couples who hate each other, who conduct open warfare in front of their children - the kind of people who have to drop the kids off at the end of the driveway in case they lay eyes on one another. At the very least, civility must reign. "
John Niven
Children
People
Kind
" I'm very fond of Glasgow, particularly the West End. The whole stretch of the west coast of Scotland from Loch Lomond up through Mallaig to the Kyle of Localsh is so beautiful. "
John Niven
End
West
Whole
" 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
School
I Can
Library
" 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
Humanity
Sea
Search
" 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
Month
You
Credit Card
" When you are a novelist, you are used to making a narrative do what you want. "
John Niven
Making
Narrative
Used
" 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
Unemployment
House
Age
" I do shamefully little for charity, and I always talk about it when I do. "
John Niven
Always
Charity
Talk
" Like measles, the reading bug is best caught when you are young. "
John Niven
You
Like
Young
" 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
Together
Two
Writing
" 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
Me
Week
Forget
" 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
Know
Better
Friends
" 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
Looking
Smiling
Winner
" It strikes me as one of nature's greatest jokes that the types of food we all like to eat more than anything (especially in winter) are the very things that cause the most insane weight gain - mounds of fluffy mashed potato, hot, thickly buttered toast, huge, steaming bowls of pasta, great big... actually, I'll stop there. "
John Niven
Great
Food
Winter
" I once read Updike after writing a first draft, and I wanted to put my own book on the fire. I've since learned to read utter crap while I'm writing: pulp is the thing. "
John Niven
My Own
Draft
Book
" My family went to Toronto to visit relatives when I was 13 or 14. It was the first time we had ever been abroad. This was the early Eighties, and I remember the impossible glamour of air travel - my mum spending days trying to decide what she was going to wear on the plane. "
John Niven
Early
Family
Time
" 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
Women
Fun
Grace
" If I hadn't had that decade in the music industry and, perhaps more importantly, time to reach the point of being sick and disgusted with it, I wouldn't have written 'Kill Your Friends.' That book gave me my whole career. "
John Niven
Book
Time
Sick
" 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
Me
Mechanic
Car
" 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
Art
Waiting
Work
" The Clash had a unique, special relationship with Scotland. Perhaps it was something to do with the energy, anger and beauty in their music. In Scotland at that time, there was a lot of to be angry about. And a great need of some energy and beauty. "
John Niven
Time
Anger
Beauty
" It has always been more expensive for the poor to borrow money. We see this in everything from mortgage rates to credit cards. "
John Niven
Always
Credit
Cards
" 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
Single
Boss
Person
" 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
Book
Cold
Height
" 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
People
You
World
" 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
Slavery
Will
Now
" As anyone who follows me on Twitter will know, I'm fairly robust in my views on there. I get next to nothing in the way of trolling. Most women I know who regularly come close to expressing an opinion get trolled constantly. This is a men-on-women issue. Guys are pretty much doing it to the girls. "
John Niven
Nothing
Women
Doing