Will Self Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the awareness that this ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you, no matter how successful and publicly lauded you become. It is intrinsic to the real business of writing and should be cherished.

  Will Self

  Real, Writing, Successful

  "Will Self's rules for writers", www.theguardian.com. February 22, 2010.

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  Will Self

  Thinking, Shining, Littles

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Islam, Trying

  22 Copy quote

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

  Will Self

  Class, Restaurants, Chains

  5 Copy quote

• There can be no more thrilling idea of intimacy that connecting with someone through the agency of the written word. Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality. The reader I seek is a tautology, for he/she is simply exactly the person who wants to read what I have written...

  Will Self

  Race, Class, Ideas

  "Will Self". Interview with Sarah Kinson, www.theguardian.com. May 9, 2007.

  4 Copy quote

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

  Will Self

  Paper, Fluid, Ifs

  "Will Self: modernism and me" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. August 3, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Life, Book, Writing

  "Will Self's rules for writers" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. February 22, 2010.

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Sadness, America, Poverty

  8 Copy quote

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

  Will Self

  Thinking, Cities, Fundamentals

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  6 Copy quote

• Continuous present is all we have, and stream of consciousness - which in a novel is arguably just as artificial as the stilted dialogue that you get in most conventional novels. They're all stratagems to try to get closer to the texture of lived life.

  Will Self

  Trying, Texture, Consciousness

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Will Self

  Errors, Anxiety, Events

  8 Copy quote

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

  Will Self

  Sports, Mind

  "You may now turn over your papers" by Geoff Dyer, Mary Midgley and Will Self, www.theguardian.com. September 24, 2010.

  6 Copy quote

• In truth, even if they have an imperfect insight into their own methods, I still slightly mistrust writers of fiction who are assured literary critics; it makes me suspect that they favour the word over the world it should describe. Such scribes fall victim too easily to the solecism of equating style with morality.

  Will Self

  Fall, Style, Fiction

  "Incidents along the road" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. February 6, 2009.

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Thinking, People

  Will Self (2012). “How the Dead Live”, p.74, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Book, Important, Trying

  "The Essential David Shrigley" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. September 10, 2010.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Believe, Thinking, Empowering

  "Why I said yes to Professor Self" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. February 22, 2012.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Party, Believe, Cheerful

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Greatness, Thinking, Opposites

  "All pleasant and correct". www.theguardian.com. June 30, 1996.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Responsibility, Too Much Power, Our Society

  "The Moral Maze" on BBC Radio 4, October 01, 2008.

  5 Copy quote

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

  Will Self

  Art, Apology, Cake

  2001 Feeding Frenzy.

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Giving, Creative, Criticism

  "Falling short: seven writers reflect on failure" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. June 22, 2013.

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Real, Dying, Disease

  "Will Self: The trouble with my blood" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. October 21, 2011.

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Century, Bounds

  4 Copy quote

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

  Will Self

  Exercise, Thinking, Littles

  1991 The QuantityTheory of Insanity and Five Supporting Propositions,'The QuantityTheory of Insanity'.

  4 Copy quote

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

  Will Self

  Space, Squares, Doubt

  4 Copy quote

Page 2 of 6

First

← Prev

1

2

3

4

5

6

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin