Will Self Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

It is fair to say that insofar as sport is taken seriously by those who play it, then to that extent their conduct in play - their ability to deal with loss or victory, their ability to meld strategic thinking and brute force - can be taken as a small-scale model of how they, or others like them, might behave in life. — Will Self

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

Sometimes the crowd is the madness - at others it's the absence of the crowd that is. — 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. — Will Self

If you believe something, you can have a morality that means something as well. You can feel recognized as an individual within the universe; it can give meaning to who you are. — Will Self

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

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

I do have a fantasy life in which I can grout bathrooms - but not for a living. — Will Self

A creative life cannot be sustained by approval any more than it can be destroyed by criticism. — Will Self

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

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

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

As my voice died away I became conscious of the voice of another woman two tables away. I couldn't hear what she was saying to her set-faced male companion, but the tone was the same as my own, the exact same plangent composite of need and recrimination. I stared at them. Their faces said it all: his awful detachment, her hideous yearning. And as I looked around the cafe at couple after couple, eaching confronting one another over the marble table tops, I had the beginnings of an intimation.
Perhaps all this awful mismatching, this emotional grating, these Mexican stand-offs of trust and commitment, were somehow in the air. It wasn't down to individuals: me and him, Grace and John, those two over there ... It was a contagion that was getting to all of us; a germ of insecurity that had lodged in all our breasts and was now fissioning frantically, creating a domino effect as relationship after relationship collapsed in a rubble of mistrust and acrimony. — Will Self

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

Schadenfreude is so nutritious. — Will Self

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

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. — Will Self

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

One of the most heartening phenomena in today's Britain is the great diversity of the modern nerd - the nerd is out and proud, and while she may love 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' merchandise more than is strictly warranted, she is in every way to be cherished as an exemplar of cosmopolitanism and tolerance. — Will Self

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

The Ridyadh Bodkin and the Kuala Lumpur Mushroom are positive Meccas for all kinds of daredevils-of this much I'm sure. Decadent Saudi princes pilot microlights through huge holes in their facades, while Malaysian spider men scale them using giant suckers in lieu of crampons. All these activities serve to demonstrate is that modernist megaliths have completely suborned the role of natural features in providing us with the essential and vertiginous perspective we require to comprehend accurately our ant-like status. — Will Self

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

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

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

We're like coke heads or chronic masturbators, aren't we? Attempting to crank the last iota of abandonment out of an instrinsically empty and mechanical experience. We push the plunger home, we abrade the clitoris, we yank the penis and we feel nothing. Not exactly nothing, worse than nothing, we feel a flicker or a prickle, the sensual equivalent of a retinal after-image. That's our fun now, not fun itself, only a tired allusion to it. Nevertheless, we feel certain that if we can allude to fun one more time, make a firm statement about it, it will return like the birds after winter. — Will Self

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

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

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. — Will Self

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

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

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

Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in ... the edit.
[Ten rules for writing fiction (part two), The Guardian, 20 February 2010] — Will Self

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

I have a healthy appetite for solitude. If you don't, you have no business being a writer. — Will Self

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

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

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

The whole aesthetics of computers very much feeds into my OCD. They fill my head with obsessionalities and my actions become very repetitive. It seems quite inimical to the dreamy state out of which fiction comes which seems so much less causally repetitive than the way one works on computers. — 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. — Will Self

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

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

Instead of looking at individual buildings, it makes more metaphorical sense to think of New York as one enormous chunk of masonry that has been cut up and carved away. It says, 'This is the ultimate polis, through which humans move like nematodes.' — Will Self

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

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

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

Once the working classes were in chains, now they're in chain restaurants. — Will Self

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

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

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 ... the person who wants to read what I have written. — Will Self

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

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

It could be argued that every age gets the comfort savagery writer it deserves. — Will Self

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

Surely it doesn't have to be this way? Stretching up the hill ahead of me, I begin to see all of my future relationships, bearing me on and up like some escalator of the fleshly. Each step is a man, a man who will penetrate me with his penis and his language, a man who will make a little private place with me, secure from the world, for a month, or a week, or a couple of years.
How much more lonely and driven is the serial monogamist than the serial killer? — Will Self

Like all right-listening folk, I am an implacable enemy of all muzak. — Will Self

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

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

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

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

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

For myself, I haven't been content to carry on producing books that merely strain against the conventions - as I've grown older, and realised that there aren't that many books left for me to write, so I've become determined that they should be the fictive equivalent of ripping the damn corset off altogether and chucking it on the fire. — Will Self

Ideologists of all kinds find a strange sort of comfort in the madness of the crowd; it confirms them in their suspicion that history, far from being made by the great mass of individuals - as Marx averred - is rather unmade by a single massive individual, a collective Other, who stands in stark contrast to you and he. — Will Self

Regard yourself as a small corporation of one. Take yourself off on team-building exercises (long walks). Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself while drinking a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under the desk. The following day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment. — Will Self

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

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

Television is the same as the telephone, and the same as the World Wide Web for that matter. People who become obsessed by the peculiarities of these communications media have simply failed to adjust to the shock of the old. People who bleat on about the 'artistic' potential of television qua television are equally deluded. — Will Self

I can't remember who it was who advocated that you should march with the left and dine with the right but I've often concurred, taking the view that I personify the great tolerance of Britain by consenting to being regally entertained. Besides, there is a degree of truth in the view that while the left are worthier, the right are wittier. — Will Self

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

A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself. — Will Self

Grove Health Center, trilled the woman on the end of the line. She had the vocal automisation that comes to people whose job description might as well read: 'Ceaseless repetition'. — 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. — Will Self

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

So heedless have we become of our own image that second-hand mobile phones now invariably come with a SIM card chock-full of discarded intimacies. — Will Self

I'm an anarchist. I'm implacably opposed to heirarchical systems of power and control. I also mistrust crowds, as they often operate according to their lowest common denominator. In terms of evolutionary psychology, the crowd is very close to a herd of stampeding wildebeest. — Will Self

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

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

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

Who'd want to be a modernist writer in the English-speaking world? — Will Self

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

A final word. Curious. Many years of reading many books has led me to a somewhat bizarre literary critical theory, namely that all significant texts are distinguished by the preponderance of a single word. In Alice's adventures in Wonderland that word is 'curious' (In The Brothers Karamazov it's 'ecstasy', but that needn't concern us here.) The word 'curious' appears so frequently in Carroll's text that it becomes a kind of tocsin awakening us from our reverie. But it isn't the strangeness of Alice's Wonderland that it reminds us of-it's the bizarre incomprehensibility of our own. — 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. — 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. — 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

Things are only boring if you are boring. — 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. — Will Self

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

An English gentleman never shines his shoes, but then nor does a lazy bastard. — Will Self

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

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

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

If the seventies were bulbous, and the eighties sharp, the nineties were nothing but bogus. — Will Self

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

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

I like texting as much as the next kidult - and embrace it as yet more evidence, along with email, that we live now in the post-aural age, when an unsolicited phone call is, thankfully, becoming more and more understood to be an unspeakable social solecism, tantamount to an impertinent invasion of privacy. — Will Self

After all, the Church had murdered itself, as with every decade more and more depressed dubiousness crept into its synods and convocations, until speaking in tongues, it beat its own skull in at the back of the vestry. Divorcees and devil-worshippers, schismatics, sodomites and self murderers
they were all the same for the impotent figures who stood in the pulpit and peered down at pitiful congregations, their numbers winnowed out by satellite television and interest-free credit. — Will Self

Drug use and procrastination often go hand in tourniquet. — 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. — Will Self