David Niven - Quotations

Quotations

By Niven:

  • "It really is amazing. Can you imagine being wonderfully overpaid for dressing up and playing games? It's like being Peter Pan."
  • "I've been lucky enough to win an Oscar, write a best-seller β€” my other dream would be to have a painting in the Louvre. The only way that's going to happen is if I paint a dirty one on the wall of the gentlemen's lavatory."
  • When asked why he seemed so incredibly cheerful all the time: "Well, old bean, life is really so bloody awful that I feel it’s my absolute duty to be chirpy and try and make everybody else happy too."
  • Deadpanning after a streaker ran across stage during an Academy Award telecast: "Well, ladies and gentlemen, that was almost bound to happen. But isn't it fascinating to think that probably the only laugh that man will ever get in his life is by stripping off and showing his shortcomings?"

About Niven:

  • "I don't think his acting ever quite achieved the brilliance or the polish of his dinner-party conversations." β€” John Mortimer
  • "David's life was Wodehouse with tears." John Mortimer speaking at Niven's memorial service, quoted by Niven biographer Graham Lord.
  • "Niv was the twinkling star, the meteor who lit up every room he entered; I am just the dreary drudge whose job it is to try to tell the truth." β€” Niven biographer Graham Lord, in the preface to his book Niv.

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Famous quotes containing the word quotations:

    “A book that furnishes no quotations is, me judice, no book—it is a plaything.”
    —Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866)

    “Reading any collection of a man’s quotations is like eating the ingredients that go into a stew instead of cooking them together in the pot. You eat all the carrots, then all the potatoes, then the meat. You won’t go away hungry, but it’s not quite satisfying. Only a biography, or autobiography, gives you the hot meal.”
    —Christopher Buckley, U.S. author. A review of three books of quotations from Newt Gingrich. “Newtie’s Greatest Hits,” The New York Times Book Review (March 12, 1995)