Words matter. These are the best John Niven Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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.
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.
In the end, being the writer on set is a bit like having organised a big party, but you’re not allowed to eat or drink anything. You just have to stand in the corner.
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.
Twitter is almost novelistic.
Don’t get me wrong: there are aspects of buying music online that I love. Instantly being able to hear a song the moment it crosses your mind? Where’s the downside? However, I do feel for those too young to remember the thrill of going record shopping.
It is publication week for my new novel ‘The Sunshine Cruise Company.’ Go me! Anyway, I may as well get the shameless plug over with right away – buy it. You’ll like it. It’s about a bunch of old ladies who rob a bank.
It’s tough being a dictator, but I’ve always thought it must be tougher being a hanger-on to a dictator. The late nights spent listening to his crazed ranting, the weary rictus grin from smiling at bad jokes, the draining knowledge that one misjudged comment could land you on the chopping block.
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.
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.
I have to confess to not being a great forward planner. I’m the kind of person who regularly arranges to have dinner with five different people on the same night.
If you put a frog in boiling water, it’ll jump straight out. If you put it in cold water and gradually bring it to the boil, it’ll sit right there until it dies. Scotland has been sitting in England’s gradually boiling water for so long that many people are used to it.
I spend a fair bit of time in Los Angeles, and there is much I love about the place – the weather, the food, the beaches and the golf. And a few things I don’t. Like the way an enormous number of mentally ill people seem to be forced to live on the streets with little or nothing in the way of government assistance.
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.’
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.
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.
On one level, of course, the notion of judging films or books or music against each other is completely ridiculous. Who’s to say ’12 Years A Slave’ is a better film than ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’? Or that one album in a certain genre is better than another in a completely different genre?
I once worked at a record label called London Records. The company was owned by Roger Ames, one of the most successful figures in the British music industry. Roger always placed a value on loafing, on holidays, on not being in the office all the time.
When you are a novelist, you are used to making a narrative do what you want.
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.’
I’m something of a black belt at break-ups. I have had two long-term relationships in my life, both of 10 years, both resulting in children, and both very much over. Things end. It is how you manage them being over that’s key.
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.
If you watch a group of schoolchildren eating lunch together, you cannot help but notice how it is a comically Lilliputian version of the adult thing – the cocked eyebrows of conversation, the reaching for condiments, the shovelling of food into tiny mouths.
I do shamefully little for charity, and I always talk about it when I do.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I love writing Scottish dialogue.
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.
I returned from my last L.A. visit to find myself tipping the scales like Homer Simpson when he tries to gain enough weight to qualify as disabled to be allowed to work from home. All I was missing was his kaftan and Fat Guy Hat. So, I decided it was time to diet.
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.
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.
