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" 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. "

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" 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

" The sight of people sleeping on the streets hits us hardest around Christmas and New Year. We see them camped out alone on the freezing concrete, and we think, with a rush of guilt, about heading home to our families and our soft beds. "

" There are precedents for what happens when societies allow the divide between rich and poor to get so huge that it stops being funny and starts becoming a sick, blood-boiling joke. If you had a Tardis, you could go back to 1917 and ask the Russian royal family how it was all going. "

" America has the largest nuclear capability in the world. All this power neither prevented 9/11 nor helped to avenge it. How could it? Who would America have attacked? "

" 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. "

" I've often found myself looking fondly at the Valentine's cultures in other countries. South Korea, for instance - where women must give chocolate to men. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Learning

Man

" Like measles, the reading bug is best caught when you are young. "

John Niven

You

Young

" The Clash were the first big love of my life. Lyrically, they inspired me to get out, explore life, and maybe kick some doors down. "

" I've never understood why the end of a relationship - especially one involving children - has to immediately signal a descent into hatred and toxicity. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" When I was a boy during Thatcher, you watched elections and wept in disbelief as the whole country turned blue, Scotland turned red, and we still got the Tories. "

" 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. "

" From everything I can read about Aussie spiders, it seems like all they really like doing is hiding in your house or garden or car until you 'accidentally' disturb them - probably by doing something crazy like putting on the shoe they are lurking in - and they can officially bite you to pieces. "

" 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. "

" As a writer, that moment every few years when I buy a new laptop and find out that all the word processing stuff has slightly changed again (stuff I spend every working day using) is like getting into bed at night and finding some mad robot where you expected your wife to be. "

" I remembered being young in the late '70s and early '80s and growing up at the height of the Cold War. I remembered how scared I was of nuclear weapons, how often I though about them and about the possibility of everything and everyone I knew vanishing in a second in temperatures hotter than the centre of the sun. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Great

Life

" 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. "