John Niven Quotes

Twitter was a mere prototype in 2006; now, many of us have become adept at saying all we have to say in 140 characters.

The shouting and opinion and jokes don't exist if there isn't first a story.

Twitter is basically text messaging. Twitter is a guy you can always elbow in the side and say, "Hey, look, a guy in a clown suit just threw up!" And I don't have 400-800 words to say about that, I just wanted to say that one thing.

A novel is a mirror carried along a main road.

I love writing shorter fiction.

Sometimes I read a script and it's obvious from early on that it's one where the suspension of disbelief has to develop strongly from page one. Some are more reality-based.

After spending the last few years working on a serious novel set in Chechnya, I was drawn to both the brevity and casualness of Twitter, and wrote a series of tweets titled 'The Erotic Inner Life of Mr. Bates from Downton Abbey.'

I've seen people twitter in haiku only.

Novels are the means by which we can escape the moment we are imprisoned in, but at the same time, the roots of a novel are in the world in which it is written. We write, and we read, to understand the world we live in.

There is commerciality in storytelling, even in a film or a piece of literature. These things exist. That's why stories came to be: to hold attention and, while you're not looking, you'll get hopefully some nutritional value that the author has been working up. That's narrative; that's passing stuff down.

Imagination, it turns out, is a great deal like reporting in your own head. Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character's actions or lines are truer than others.

I think maybe my attention span is too long to tweet.

Fiction is about telling a good story, first and foremost. But of course, everything I'm interested in or angry about leaks into my writing, from art to violence against women.

I want to tell stories for everyone, primarily.

I can't think of a story that doesn't have something terrible in it. Otherwise, it's dull. So when I embarked into the world of picture books, my first thought was to do something about the dark.

People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.

I'm the Ernest Hemingway of 140 characters.

I wanted to tell a story that interested me as much in the telling as in the watching.

A good story is a good story no matter who wrote it.

Fiction is socially meaningful.

The way I express ideas is through the plot, Suspense is an important part of expressing an idea.

People worry about Twitter. Twitter is banal. It's 140-character messages. By definition, you can hardly say anything profound. On the other hand, we communicate. And, sometimes, we communicate about things that are important.

A good story is a good story, whatever the medium.

A lot of times as writers, you want to come up with the best possible story, and you bend it according to what you want to happen. I think one of the things that I always try to think about is what would really happen in a situation, what feels real.

When you are a novelist, you are used to making a narrative do what you want.