Will Self Quotes

#1. Many of my works fall into the category of 'Zeitgeist novels'. Yet I hope that they aren't only reportage, but also attempts to convey the sense of the present to the future.

Will Self

#2. In my view, the plangent artificiality of a lot of creative work results from the fact that the people who write novels, direct films and put on plays tend to read too many novels, watch too many films and go to too many plays.

Will Self

#3. Alan sensed Bull as liability, pure liability, triple liability. Alan was now having an affair with a man who had a cunt in the back of his leg. Worse still, the man was his patient. At the very least he would be struck off ...

Will Self

#4. Modernism has a reputation for being a forbidding phenomenon: its visual arts disconcertingly non-representational, its literary efforts devoid of the consolations of plot and character - even its films, it's argued, fall well short of that true desideratum: entertainment.

Will Self

#5. Whatever respect photography may once have deserved is now superfluous in view of its own superfluity.

Will Self

#6. I'd rather fiddle with my phone for precious seconds than neglect an apostrophe; I'd rather insert a word laboriously keyed out than resort to predictive texting for a - acceptable to some - synonym.

Will Self

#7. Don't try it," he said. The mutant was reading my mind. "You, boy, you're a literary trainspotter ...

Will Self

#8. It might be an idea for all literary critics to read the books they analyse aloud - it certainly helps to fix them in the mind, while providing a readymade seminar with your audience.

Will Self

#9. Not only is the statistical madness an assault on individuality, it's also one on temporality too. Statistics - even when accurate - are only an image of the past that can then be Photoshopped before being pasted on to the future.

Will Self

#10. Of course, with well-masticated food playing the role of social glue, it's absolutely essential that everyone clear their plate. Sod the starving kiddies in Africa - it's the overfed ones here we need to worry about.

Will Self

#11. I make no apology for preoccupying myself with architecture, television, conceptual art, restaurants and Jane Asher's cakes.

Will Self

#12. I always wanted to write fiction. Always. As far back as I can remember it's been integral to my sense of myself - everything else was always a displacement activity.

Will Self

#13. Dan slept throughout - but a man who sleeps with his head lying on a phone table can never really sleep with a clean conscience

Will Self

#14. A party full of 'likeable' people doesn't bear contemplating.

Will Self

#15. As the render is to the building, and the blueprint to the machine, so sport is to social existence.

Will Self

#16. Like all right-listening folk, I am an implacable enemy of all muzak.

Will Self

#17. When anyone starts out to do something creative - especially if it seems a little unusual - they seek approval, often from those least inclined to give it. But a creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism - you learn this as you go on.

Will Self

#18. I enjoy doing very high mileages, partly out of masochism and also because I like to feel the shape of the landscape.

Will Self

#19. I prefer to write first drafts as soon as possible after waking, so that the oneiric inscape is still present to me.

Will Self

#20. There's a flip side to having prominent public intellectuals, which is that they start meddling in politics and often with quite disastrous results.

Will Self

#21. Because I was a young man so, of course, I did get into fights. The last time I actually was in a fight, in the sense of throwing punches myself, was probably when I was at college, not since 1980. But I remember being attacked quite a few times in the '80s.

Will Self

#22. The book was thick and red. It was almost thicker than it was wide, a thickness that somehow enhanced its bookishness. It was - to me aged 12 - quite clearly more of a book than most, if not all, of the paperbacks untidily stacked on the shelves of my father's study.

Will Self

#23. Mother sighed with exasperation. "Look, there aren't any "people in charge of death". When you die you move to another part of London, that's all there is to it. Period.

Will Self

#24. Who'd want to be a modernist writer in the English-speaking world?

Will Self

#25. People tend to think of their lives as having a dramatic arc, because they read too much fiction.

Will Self

#26. There is a deep sadness to American poverty, greater than the sadness of any other kind. It's because America has such an ideology of success.

Will Self

#27. Some people have human muses - mine is a city. I feel a startling ambivalence towards London, but for better or worse my work has come utterly to depend upon it.

Will Self

#28. You may have gathered that I am not the most cheerful of revellers - some characterise me as the death and soullessness of any party but it wasn't always so, believe me.

Will Self

#29. I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form.

Will Self

#30. I'm going to end up like one of those old weirdos who lives in a network of tunnels burrowed through trash - yet I do not fear this.

Will Self

#31. Things are only boring if you are boring.

Will Self

#32. If the government announced that it was going to allocate a vast tranche of education funding purely to the pupils at the best public schools, there would be a national outcry - and yet this is precisely what the Olympics represents in terms of sports funding.

Will Self

#33. The only circumstances in which I would write a roman a clef would be if I'd lost my fucking car keys.

Will Self

#34. It would seem that I, who never could make much sense of physics when I was at school, have now gained a strong sense of Einsteinian space-time. I am free of the nimbyism of now, and feel a strong kinship with both the dead and the unborn.

Will Self

#35. My novels tend to come about from a fusion of two big ideas, creating a critical mass that then fissions, throwing off hundreds of other particles, riffs, tropes and characters.

Will Self

#36. I'm very happy for whatever plaudits might come the way of my work, but I never ever sit down to write x with y in view - whether it's a reader, a prize or a sale.

Will Self

#37. Once the working classes were in chains, now they're in chain restaurants.

Will Self

#38. From time to time, as if heaven-sent to annoy, someone will ask me if I'm self-disciplined when it comes to my work. I usually look witheringly at them and snarl, 'What do you think?' I mean, how do you imagine anyone writes a quarter of a million words a year for publication?

Will Self

#39. But in Ward 9 the air had a real quality, it clamped itself over your face like a pad of cotton wool, soaked through with the sweet chloroform of utter sadness. - Ward 9

Will Self

#40. Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.

Will Self

#41. I have a healthy appetite for solitude. If you don't, you have no business being a writer.

Will Self

#42. To purposely concoct older characters of a sunny disposition would be as much of a solecism as deliberately fabricating arrhythmic blacks, spendthrift Jews, slacker Japanese and so on.

Will Self

#43. A creative life cannot be sustained by approval any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.

Will Self

#44. I don't think in terms of that bizarre tautology 'value for money' in my literary and journalistic work - and nor will I in my academic role. However, if I don't believe I'm helping my students towards a fuller and more empowering relationship with the world, then I'll resign.

Will Self

#45. If we bought everything on the Internet, our eyes and mouths and nostrils would probably begin to film over with a tegument - one initially tissue-thin and capable of being removed each morning, but which gradually thickened and hardened until we were imprisoned in our own tiny minds.

Will Self

#46. The life of the professional writer - like that of any freelance, whether she be a plumber or a podiatrist - is predicated on willpower. Without it there simply wouldn't be any remuneration, period.

Will Self

#47. He parked in a nearby street and walked out on to the bridge. Below him the lights of London spread away in a wash of low wattage, Their dimness gave the lie to the very vastless of the city. Bull heard its distant roar, its night-time sough, its terminal cough

Will Self

#48. There is something mysteriously powerful that can happen when young, inchoate minds come into contact with older and more worldly ones in a spirit of intellectual and creative endeavour - if I believed in progress, I suppose that's what I'd call it.

Will Self

#49. Whenever I produce my best work, it's always because I've spent time being idle. Something always emerges after nothing.

Will Self

#50. As a bookish adolescent, I sopped up texts as if I were blotting paper and they were fluid.

Will Self

#51. I think in retrospect that all those 'alternative'modes of living were little more than exercises in arrested development.

Will Self

#52. An English gentleman never shines his shoes, but then nor does a lazy bastard.

Will Self

#53. Schadenfreude is so nutritious.

Will Self

#54. It could be argued that every age gets the comfort savagery writer it deserves.

Will Self

#55. Lives don't divide up into chapters. People don't just talk, while nothing's going on in their head, and then respond. You know, none of these things actually happen.

Will Self

#56. The only proper suit-and-tie job I've had in my life was the two years in the late 1980s when I ran a small corporate publishing company. I even had a Ford Sierra!

Will Self

#57. In survey after survey, people report that the greatest dangers they face are, in this order: terrorist attack, plane crashes and nuclear accidents. This despite the fact that these three combined have killed fewer people in the past half-century than car accidents do in any given year.

Will Self

#58. Certainly, for time out of mind, an obsessive dwelling on happier former days has been synonymous with getting older, while it was the juvenescent who rushed with open arms to embrace the future.

Will Self

#59. The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply.

Will Self

#60. We've been watching your kind, noting it all down, putting it in our order pads while you snort in your trough. It may be fragmented, it may not be prettified, it may not be in the Grand Tradition, but let me tell you
it's ours and we're ready to publish!

Will Self

#61. A funny yet interesting read, Will Self knowa his stuff and must do a lot of deep research.

Will Self

#62. If the seventies were bulbous, and the eighties sharp, the nineties were nothing but bogus.

Will Self

#63. Death, the real simile for disease - for when we are ill, do we not always feel like we are dying, even if it's only a little? - remains, despite our secularism, the most metaphoricised phenomenon of all.

Will Self

#64. As far as I can see, the history of experimental art in the twentieth century is intimately bound up with the experience of intoxification.

Will Self

#65. Nowadays, my mood ungoverned, I'm free to think the most outrageous things, such as: might it not be a good idea to insist that drug companies give their preparations names that tell the user what they really do?

Will Self

#66. With the morbid realisation that his sexual being was a dull thing, a lifeless thing, a mass-produced marionette with chipped paint and fraying strings

Will Self

#67. The novelist, quite rightly, fears the psychoanalyst as both an enemy and a usurper.

Will Self

#68. The seventies were my fattest decade. Overall I think the seventies were distinctly bulbous. People looked chunky, typefaces were rounded, writing implements penile.

Will Self

#69. I write as someone who has no more time for repressive Islam than he does for repressive Christianity or Judaism, but at least look at the face in the hijab - and try to imagine the one beneath the niqab - before you depersonalise its wearer.

Will Self

#70. As a writer, I'm not convinced that we are the best equipped to understand how we go about the business of literary production.

Will Self

#71. Wealth is a form of power in our society. With great power comes great responsibility. If you have too much wealth, ipso facto, you have too much power - therefore you have too much responsibility - and you're a kind of dictator.

Will Self

#72. The postgrad at least knew enough to know that he would never know enough, lying under the stars which hung from the inky sky like bunches of inconceivably heavy, lustrous grapes, dusted with the yeast of eternity.

Will Self

#73. Without a shadow of doubt, Trafalgar Square has to be one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world.

Will Self

#74. Live life and write about life. Of the making of many books there is indeed no end, but there are more than enough books about books.

Will Self

#75. Sometimes the crowd is the madness - at others it's the absence of the crowd that is.

Will Self

#76. The fictional work is a kind of actor that wears a satirical garb but can put on other costumes as well.

Will Self

#77. For the rest, silence or good music, not much food, a lot of solitude, walks on the Heath, the time to think while others ... well, often fall apart. Not so bad, not so bad at all. Being queer and self-sufficient is the best present at this season.

Will Self

#78. To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail - the disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content, and the leaden, halting sentences on the page always seems a dreadful falling short.

Will Self

#79. I'm English enough to feel something of a gut-reaction to modernism, to continental philosophising and anything that smacks of a refusal to pay attention to the forensics: the empirical facts on the ground.

Will Self

#80. I used to find myself goofed out in the street on drugs. And I had such a bad problem with addiction at the time that I didn't mind. I was dealing cocaine and shooting up a lot of cocaine. And that's not a good space to be in.

Will Self

#81. Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality.

Will Self

#82. In our benighted age, when films about amusement park rides and electronic fidgets scoop the honours, perhaps Hollywood redux is the best we can hope for.

Will Self

#83. I think it's a misreading of Dostoevsky to think of him as a programmatic theist. He's actually much closer to someone like William James. He's actually a pragmatist.

Will Self

#84. It is not that sport, over-indulged in, coarsens the mind; it is that it dulls it.

Will Self

#85. Why is Mr Universe always from Earth?

Will Self

#86. Well, it's like this," began Mother, "When you die you go and live in another part of London. And that's it." ~ North London Book of the Dead

Will Self

#87. As a species, we're addicted to the facile discrimination involved in saying that something or phenomenon is either 'this' or 'that' - how much more uncomfortable that it may well be 'the other'.

Will Self

#88. A staccato script of letters and digits beamed from an alternate world. Then they ceased communicating altogether. and began to liase in dreams and nightmares.

Will Self

#89. What fiction offers us is an intimacy shorn of the messy contingencies of human existence - gender, race, class or age. Those moments of transcendence when we exclaim 'You know exactly what I mean!' depend for much of their force on the anonymous character of the intimacy between writer and reader.

Will Self

#90. Lust was a positive high-tension cable, plugged into my core, activating a near-epileptic seizure of conviction that this was the one thing I had to do in life.

Will Self

#91. Political activists of all stripes are usually a wacky bunch, and never more so than in a system like Britain's, where power is effected via the quiescence of the electorate as much as its convictions.

Will Self

#92. The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact opposite: British fiction is cool, American naff.

Will Self

#93. Catching a glimpse of his rather hippyish form in a mirror, he wonders at this atavism of apparel, is it an inversion of foetal ontogeny, in which the phenotype passes through previous fashion stages? Soon there will be gaiters and gloves ... I will probably die, he thinks, clad in animal skins.

Will Self

#94. The main differences between contemporary English and American literature is that the baleful pseudo-professionalism imparted by all those crap M.F.A. writing programs has yet to settle like a miasma of standardization on the English literary scene. But it's beginning to happen.

Will Self

#95. I do have a fantasy life in which I can grout bathrooms - but not for a living.

Will Self

#96. I am a regular, if not exactly enthusiastic, patron of my local bookshop. I try to buy at least some books there because I cling to the belief that it's important to maintain those businesses which put a human face on the exchange of money for goods and services.

Will Self

#97. The paradox of modernism is, writers make the decision to work with the continuous present, and to work with ... stream of consciousness, as it's called, for emotional reasons, and the main emotional reason is verisimilitude. I mean, this is what surprises people: Life is not in the simple past.

Will Self

#98. I think the fundamental apprehension is that the city's an organism of some form, rather than being governed from above.

Will Self

#99. As for critical writing about modernism, its moments of lucidity are but fulgurations illuminating the dark and incomprehensible landscape of its subject's unabashed difficulty.

Will Self

#100. The high arts of literature and music stand in a curious relationship to one another, at once securely comfortable and deeply uneasy - rather like a long-term marriage.

Will Self