John Niven Quotes

Hosting the Oscars is much like making love to a woman. It's something I only get to do when Billy Crystal is out of town.

I love the Oscars. All sorts of tacky people win. And watching everyone run up and down those aisles is just adorable.

It was five years since I'd won a race, so I was a bit bewildered.

The same people who smile in my face would be the same ones to talk behind my back.

To hear the Japanese plead for free trade is like hearing the word love on the lips of a harlot.

I'm as pure as the driven slush.

As I'm always fond of telling hosts at the Oscars who are doing it for their first time, for everybody who wins, there are four people who don't. As the evening wears on, the room fills up with losers, and then they are bitter.

I'm just shocked at how blatantly shallow people are sometimes.

Nothing is so boring as having to keep up a deception.

Welcome to the 77th and last Oscars.

I just can't seem to write songs about peace and love. Yeah right, how do you get that?

Get thee glass eyes ;, And, like a scurvy politician, seem To see the things thou dost not.

The days and weeks of screwed-up smiles and laboured courtesy, the mock geniality, the hearty shake of the filthy hand, the chuckling reply that must be made to the coarse joke, the loathsome, choking compliment that must be paid to the grimy wife and sluttish daughter, the indispensable flattery of the vilest religious prejudices, the wholesale deglutition of hypocritical pledges.

I was never able to master the virtue of humility but I was able to master the appearance of humility.

I loved all awards shows growing up, but of course, the Oscars was the biggest one.

I loved the Oscars, and I had V.H.S. tapes for the Oscars, and I used to watch them over and over. There was probably one year where I watched it, like, 20 times or something.

I don't like to lose, man. I think that's where it starts for me. If we're not winning games, then I don't smile too often.

A sociable smile is nothing but a mouth full of teeth.

Exactly how am I supposed to work in a thank-you in there? Somehow it just won't seem sincere if I'm trying to slit his throat.

I just give lip service to being the greatest. He was the greatest.

The only acting you ever see at the Oscars is when people act like they’re not mad they lost. Nicole Kidman was smiling so wide, she should have won an Emmy at the Oscars for her great performance. I was like, "If you’d done that in the movie, you’d have won an Oscar, girl."

I love you', though, were three words she had often heard during her twenty-two years, and it seemed to her that they were now completely devoid of meaning, because they had never turned into anything serious or deep, never translated into a lasting relationship.

In prayer we call ourselves 'worms of the dust', but it is only on a sort of tacit understanding that the remark shall not be taken at par.

Oh, for a pin that would puncture pretension!

One kind of flirtation is to boast we never flirt.