“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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“...when the present stung her, she sought her antidote in the future, which was as sure to hold achievement as the dying flower to hold the fruit when its petals wither.”
― Elspeth Huxley, quote from The Flame Trees of Thika: Memories of an African Childhood
“8Let me exult and rejoice in Your faithfulness when You notice my affliction, are mindful of my deep distress, 9and do not hand me over to my enemy, but a-grant me relief.-a 10Have mercy on me, O LORD, for I am in distress; my eyes are wasted by vexation, b-my substance and body too.-b 11My life is spent in sorrow, my years in groaning; my strength fails because of my iniquity, my limbs waste away. 12Because of all my foes I am the particular butt of my neighbors, a horror to my friends; those who see me on the street avoid me. 13I am put out of mind like the dead; I am like an object given up for lost. 14I hear the whisperings of many,”
― quote from Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures
“People ask sometimes, when they get up the courage, what it's like to lose someone you love. I tell them it's hard, and leave it at that.
I could tell them that it's a crucifixion of the heart. I could say that most days after, I screamed without stopping, even as I moved through the city, even with my mouth closed, even though I didn't make a sound. I could tell them I have this dream, every night, and lose him again, every morning.
But, hey, why ruin their day? So I tell them it's hard. That usually seems to satisfy them.”
― Cody McFadyen, quote from Shadow Man
“They called themselves the Munrungs. It meant The People, or The True Human Beings.
It's what most people call themselves, to begin with. And then one day the tribe meets some other People or, if it's not been a good day, The Enemy. If only they'd think up a name like Some More True Human Beings, it'd save a lot of trouble later on”
― Terry Pratchett, quote from The Carpet People
“He'd [Cork] delivered tragic news before. It had been part of the job, but he'd never become immune to he effect tragedy had on those who had to hear of it, and he'd never become used to his own feeling of helplessness in those situations.”
― William Kent Krueger, quote from Iron Lake
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Lord JimBookQuoters 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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