Will Self Quotes - Page 5

Quotes about:

• Life, it is true, can be grasped in all its confused futility merely by opening one's eyes and sitting passively, a spectator on the stands of history - but to understand the social processes and conflicts, the interplay between individual and group, even the physicality of human experience, we have need of small-scale models.

  Will Self

  Confused, Eye, Futility Of Life

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

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• 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

  Fall, Zeitgeist, Categories

  "In the beginning" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. June 16, 2007.

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• 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

  Art, Fall, Character

  "Constellation of Genius, 1922: Modernism Year One by Kevin Jackson - review" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. October 19, 2012.

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• 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

  Thinking, Names, Ideas

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• That tertiary education is under a sustained assault by a political and - it often seems - social consensus that equates all education with training for increased productivity, only makes academe a still more promising environment for a contrarian.

  Will Self

  Political, Training, Environment

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

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• 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.

  Will Self

  Past, Land, Anxiety

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• The marvellous thing about writing, whether it be fiction or journalism, is that it is simultaneously the most intimate and the most anonymous of meetings between people. It is profoundly intimate in reaching into the psyche of another, at the same time as being devoid of social characteristics, cultural characteristics, economic characteristics.

  Will Self

  Writing, People, Fiction

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• 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

  Jobs, Years, Two

  "My Other Life: Will Self". www.theguardian.com. October 31, 2009.

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• 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

  Fall, Writing, Pages

  "Falling short: seven writers reflect on failure" by Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Julian Barnes, Anne Enright, Howard Jacobson, Will Self and Lionel Shriver, www.theguardian.com. June 22, 2013.

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• What the British seem to like are television historians and naturalists, not public intellectuals. You can't help feeling that's because one supplies narrative and the other supplies facts, and the British are traditionally empiricists so they/we have a resistance to theory and to theoreticians playing too prominent a role in public life.

  Will Self

  Feelings, Facts, Roles

  "Britain's intellectuals: leading thinkers have their say" by Alain de Botton, AC Grayling, Susie Orbach, Paul Gilroy, Will Self, Mary Beard, Brian Cox, Lionel Shriver, James Lovelock and Lisa Jardine, www.theguardian.com. May 7, 2011.

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• You can always spot a 'television personality', even when they aren't actually on television, because they carry their 'made-up' persona in front of them, like some sort of baffler, or Ready Brek force field. Their reach for notoriety predicated on that fulsome mediocrity of talent detailed above has become frozen in their faces.

  Will Self

  Force Fields, Personality, Mediocrity

  "Chris the saviour". www.theguardian.com. March 9, 1997.

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

  Will Self

  Race, Class, Age

  Interview with Sarah Kinson, www.theguardian.com. May 09, 2007.

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• Vaughn's vision is older, wiser and harder than Ritchie's.

  Will Self

  Vision, Harder, Wiser

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• 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

  Lust, Conviction, Epileptics

  Will Self (2013). “How the Dead Live”, p.67, A&C Black

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

  Will Self

  Seventies, Eighty, Ifs

  Will Self (2012). “How the Dead Live”, p.318, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Well, I wanted to be a philosopher, which is the idlest occupation in the world. I wanted to be involved in abstract thought, but because of various problems with the authorities I wasn't able to pull that one off. A lifetime of idleness in academia would have really suited me. So I was thrown out, as it were. Other than that, there seemed no possible idle occupations, so writing . . . although writing isn't exactly idleness. There's an enormous tension between indolence and languor.

  Will Self

  Philosophy, Writing, Creativity

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• ...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

  Fashion, Animal, Thinking

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• Always carry a notebook. And I mean always.

  Will Self

  Notebook, Mean

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

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• 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

  Character, Mean, Class

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

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• 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

  Willpower, Remuneration, Periods

  "Willpower by Roy F Baumeister and John Tierney - review" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. January 18, 2012.

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• 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

  Powerful, Creative, Intellectual

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

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• 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

  Character, Ideas, Two

  "In the beginning" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. June 16, 2007.

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• 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

  Worry, Essentials, Glue

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• We've clearly entered a period in which the analog of text is no longer important or relevant. All text will be electronic. I accept that fact. My house has thousands of books in it, and I've started to look at them completely differently. They now seem to me to be like antiquarian objects. Their use value has become negligible to me because I'm perfectly happy to read on an e-reader.

  Will Self

  Book, House, Important

  "Charles Ray". Interview with Will Self, www.interviewmagazine.com. January 21, 2013.

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• 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

  Space, Addiction, Drug

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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