“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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“I'd been holding the dress up to myself and gazing at my reflection in the store's mirror. "Seth, this is just a party. And it's definitely not a dress Cinderella would wear."
"Then be Callierella," he said with a wink. "Or Calliepunzel and you can lock yourself in your bedroom until Kayden begs for you to let him in."
I had snorted a laugh. "Are you drunk? I mean, I know you had a margarita at lunch, but it usually takes a lot more for you to get tipsy."
"I'm not drunk," he said, snatching the dress from my hand. "I'm just trying to give you the fairy-tale you deserve."
"Life isn't a fairy-tale," I replied. But in the end, I bought the dress, kind of wishing it was.”
― Jessica Sorensen, quote from The Redemption of Callie & Kayden
“Who Am I? Or (Perhaps More Accurately) Who Else Could Be Me?”
― Chuck Klosterman, quote from Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto
“The way to maintain one's connection to the wild is to ask yourself what it is that you want. This is the sorting of the seed from the dirt. One of the most important discriminations we can make in this matter is the difference between things that beckon to us and things that call from our souls.
Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the choice of mates and lovers. A lover cannot be chosen a la smorgasbord. A lover has to be chosen from soul-craving. To choose just because something mouthwatering stands before you will never satisfy the hunger of the soul-self. And that is what the intuition is for; it is the direct messenger of the soul.”
― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, quote from Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
“Why would I care what you looked like? The flesh was the shell that housed the glory.”
― Anne Bishop, quote from Dreams Made Flesh
“I don't think anyone ever remembers what they were really like as kids. Adults think they do, but they don't. Photos and videos don't capture the real you, or bring back to life the person you used to be. You have to return to the past to do that.”
― Darren Shan, quote from Sons of Destiny
Forest of the Gods
Battle of the Ampere
Prick
A Game of Thrones: T...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.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
