Will Self quotes - page 2

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)
It is not that sport, over-indulged in, coarsens the mind; it is that it dulls it. View quote
Will Self
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! View quote
Will Self
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. View quote
Will Self
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. View quote
Will Self
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. View quote
Will Self
With spectacular events taking up so much of the available anxiety quotient, we need to be constantly reminded of the more workaday threats to our mortality - threats that, while they may also be functions of human error, have become so ubiquitous that we've begun to apprehend them as natural phenomena. View quote
Will Self
The fictional work is a kind of actor that wears a satirical garb but can put on other costumes as well. View quote
Will Self
The future continues to preoccupy me as a reliable source of hopes, fears and anxieties, but increasingly the present seems to have no outstanding qualities of its own, being merely a way-station through which events travel to the vast shadow lands of the past. View quote
Will Self
I think I now understand why it is that the young are so very nostalgic. They have so little by way of personal history that they polish it up and make it shine like a treasured heirloom. View quote
Will Self
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)
People tend to think of their lives as having a dramatic arc, because they read too much fiction. View quote
Will Self
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. View quote
Will Self
I prefer to write first drafts as soon as possible after waking, so that the oneiric inscape is still present to me. View quote
Will Self
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. View quote
Will Self
A party full of 'likeable' people doesn't bear contemplating. View quote
Will Self
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. View quote
Will Self
A very beautiful young woman once asked me to sign her breasts. That was back when I was a hip young thing - it's been all downhill since then. View quote
Will Self
Just as the blurring between childhood and adulthood has produced the kidult, so the stretching of middle into old age has fostered another peculiar chimera: septuagenarians with apoptosis sporting the depeche mode. View quote
Will Self
You don't need to know this - but here goes: due to some acquired infantilism, I feel compelled to fall asleep listening to the radio. On a good night, I'll push the frail barque of my psyche off into the waters of Lethe accompanied by the midnight newsreader - on a bad one, it's the shipping forecast. View quote
Will Self
As a bookish adolescent, I sopped up texts as if I were blotting paper and they were fluid. (Will Self)
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. View quote
Will Self
The novelist, quite rightly, fears the psychoanalyst as both an enemy and a usurper. View quote
Will Self
Whatever respect photography may once have deserved is now superfluous in view of its own superfluity. View quote
Will Self
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. View quote
Will Self