John Niven Quotes

What I wanted in life always was to write something as good as 'Pinocchio.' I wanted to write. I wanted to evolve. I wanted to grow.

I knew as far back as 2001 that I would write a book called 'A Visit From the Goon Squad,' though I had no idea what kind of book it would be.

I think 'Dark Blue' came to me while I was doing a project in London. I read it, and the character immediately popped out at me.

I always wanted to write novels, even before I had read a lot of novels or had a very good idea of what they were.

You know how sometimes you hear a chord played on an organ and you can feel it vibrating in your bones? Sometimes when I'm writing, I can feel my bones vibrating because I'll have a thought or I'll have a character's voice in my head, and that's when I know I'm on the right track.

Definitely they write themselves. It's an amazing experience. It's like the characters have come alive and are sitting on my shoulder talking to me, telling me their tales.

I didn't know anything about writers. It never occurred to me they were regular people and that I could grow up to become one, even though I loved to make up stories inside my head.

I always say that, for me, writing a book is like a wacky Greyhound bus trip - I know where I'm starting and where I'll end up, but I have no idea what will happen along the way.

The move to creating stories was a natural progression for me, but the most pivotal time was probably in 6th grade: That year, a friend introduced me to the stories of Ray Bradbury, and a student teacher introduced me to creative writing.

I was very fortunate that my first novel captivated the imaginations of so many readers who asked for a sequel. After that, one book led to another as I discovered other facets to my characters I wanted to investigate further.

Writing is a mysterious process, and many ideas come from deep within the imagination, so it's very hard to say how characters come about. Mostly, they just happen.

I hope the wonder of what happens to my characters never goes away. That yearning keeps me writing.

Because I'm such a creative person, and I've always got my nose in a book, I suppose it was only a matter of time before non-fiction turned into fiction again. But I never consciously set out to become a writer and I never thought I'd be doing the things I'm doing today.

I don't have goals when writing books, apart from getting to the end. I have rather vague ideas about how I want things to feel, I'm big on ambience. I have a title, a beginning and a probable ending and go from there.

Today I began the novel that I determined to be great.

I get to do what I love every day. I get to crawl into someone else's head and I love that.

William Faulkner, Muriel Spark, Richard Yates, William Styron, James Salter, Alice Munro. They're very different writers, and I admire them for different reasons. The common thread, I guess, is that they remind me what's possible, why I wanted to write fiction in the first place.

I had this story that had been banging around in my head and I thought, 'I'll just see if there's anything there.' So I wrote a few chapters of the book that became 'Year of Wonders,' and lucky for me it found its readers.

Writing was something I always as a kid thought would be fabulous and glamorous to be a writer.

The deal is such that when I begin writing something, I open a door, and those characters come in, and then they won't leave, and so I live with them every day, all day. They are there with me when I'm driving my kids to school, when I'm standing in line at the grocery store.

I spend so long writing each of my novels that by the time I'm done with one, I'm ready to discover a totally different world.

I don't think there was a time I ever thought of myself as anything but a writer. I thought I was going to be the next Toni Morrison.

The book that first made me want to be a writer is Flannery O'Connor's short story collection 'A Good Man Is Hard To Find.'

The process is different for every book, but there are similarities. I always draw from the inside out. I don't plot them ahead of time, and I'm always surprised by things that happen in my books.

I get a lot of energy from making things up, which is why I feel I'm a novelist.