“Yeah, beware the small man... Always beware the small man. He'll fuck you every time. Because they never forget, do they? All that grief they got at school. Over and over, and for the rest of their miserable short-arsed lives, someone's got to pay.”
― John Niven, quote from Kill Your Friends
“Here’s the important thing to say about meetings – nothing important ever got decided in a meeting. The place to get your own way is over lunch, in someone’s office, in the corridor, over drinks, dinner, anywhere but in a fucking meeting. What meetings are very good for, however, is stitching people up – undermining, belittling and humiliating them.”
― John Niven, quote from Kill Your Friends
“One thing you'll learn when you're in the business of selling utter shite to the Great British Public is that there's really no bottom to where they'll go. Shit food, shit TV, shit bands, shit films, shit houses. There is absolutely no fucking bottom with this stuff. The shittier you can make it - a bad photocopy of a bad photocopy of what was a shit idea in the first place - the more they'll eat it up with a big fucking spoon, from dawn till dusk, from now until the end of time. It's too good.”
― John Niven, quote from Kill Your Friends
“The notion of children makes me ill. The thought of having one... when you see those guys in the supermarket, wheeling the trolley around while their brats whine and wheedle and some blundering sow questions every little thing they take off the shelves. I mean, just the fucking idea of it, the very word: family. Whenever I see it, on travel brochures, on house schedules... I feel sick.”
― John Niven, quote from Kill Your Friends
“I do not understand the festival experience. These people, these disgusting lowlifes we’re driving through, they fought to get in here. They think they’re lucky. They spent hours on the phone trying to get tickets, happily paying hundreds of pounds for a pair when they managed to find some. Now they’re celebrating being here, celebrating the fact that they can lie around in urine-flavoured mud drinking warm lager and eating burgers prepared by some syphilitic gyppo while fucking Cast knock out their greatest hits in the distance.”
― John Niven, quote from Kill Your Friends
“You realise that people actually have to live in among all this and that east London is the bill, the tab that these cunts are picking up so that you can live in west London.”
― John Niven, quote from Kill Your Friends
“One thing you learn when you’re in the business of selling utter shite to the Great British Public is that there’s really no bottom to where they’ll go. Shit food, shit TV, shit bands, shit films, shit houses. There is absolutely no fucking bottom with this stuff. The shittier you can make it – a bad photocopy of a bad photocopy of what was a shit idea in the first place – the more they’ll eat it up with a fucking big spoon, from dawn till dusk, from now until the end of time.”
― John Niven, quote from Kill Your Friends
“As someone who makes their living from anticipating, from shaping, the tastes of millions of tasteless morons, you have to tell yourself that the things you feel are universal, that the things you think and feel are thought and felt by millions of other people.”
― John Niven, quote from Kill Your Friends
“With the indie kids you have to remember this: they really think that what they do matters in some way. They reckon that history will care. (They don’t know that history will have other shit to be getting on with.) The indie kids figure that they’re passing on the torch or some fucking thing. That, just as they were influenced by someone—the Velvet Underground, Jonathan Richman, the Stooges, whoever—then, in the future, young bands will be influenced by them. Maybe so. Maybe a few thousand malnourished cockless freaks scattered around the globe will give a shit. So what? Real people don’t..”
― John Niven, quote from Kill Your Friends
“Scattered around his desk and perched on his shelves are various Star Wars products; little X-Wing fighters, a Millennium Falcon, a big R2D2 that’s actually a phone. Like many men in the record industry in their late twenties/early thirties Waters thought Star Wars was cool. Just looking at his dismal toys feels like justification enough for killing the cretin.”
― John Niven, quote from Kill Your Friends
John Niven
Born place: Irvine, Ayrshire, The United Kingdom
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“All will be well. Seventeen years later, I knew her meaning. You will find the courage to walk through whatever life gives you.”
― Christina Haag, quote from Come to the Edge
“Love. It is an incredible sensation. An amazing gift. All consuming and yet as light as a whisper. Once you've been in love you don't ever want to find yourself out of it.”
― Jenna Bayley-Burke, quote from Compromising Positions
“There is a widespread philosophical tendency towards the view which tells us that Man is the measure of all things, that truth is man-made, that space and time and the world of universals are properties of the mind, and that, if there be anything not created by the mind, it is unknowable and of no account for us. This view, if our previous discussions were correct, is untrue; but in addition to being untrue, it has the effect of robbing philosophic contemplation of all that gives it value, since it fetters contemplation to Self. What it calls knowledge is not a union with the not-Self, but a set of prejudices, habits, and desires, making an impenetrable veil between us and the world beyond. The man who finds pleasure in such a theory of knowledge is like a man who never leaves the domestic circle for fear his word might not be law.”
― Bertrand Russell, quote from The Problems of Philosophy
“In theory, a coven is just a group of witches working together.” Jamie looked pained. “In practice?” “In practice, it tends to be really heavy on ritual, really light on actual magic.”
― Debora Geary, quote from A Modern Witch
“In 1589, Denmark introduced the death penalty for gypsy ringleaders,’ he said. ‘Fifty years later the Swedes decided all male gypsies should be hanged. In Moravia they cut the left ear off gypsy women, in Bohemia the right. The Archbishop of Mainz proclaimed that all gypsies should be executed without a conviction as their way of life was outlawed. In 1725, a law was passed in Prussia that all gypsies over eighteen should be executed without a trial, but later this law was repealed–the age limit was put down to fourteen. Four of my father’s brothers died in captivity. Only one of them during the War. Shall I continue?”
― Jo Nesbø, quote from Nemesis
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The Assassination of...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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