Will Self Quotes

Sometimes it occurs to me that the job of a serious cultural critic mostly consists in telling the generality of people that their opinions - on films, on books, on all manner of widgets, gadgets and even the latest electronic fidgets - simply aren't up to scratch.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

I gain nothing but pleasure from writing fiction; short stories are foreplay, novellas are heavy petting – but novels are the full monte. Frankly, if I didn't enjoy writing novels I wouldn't do it – the world hardly needs any more and I can think of numerous more useful things someone with my skills could be engaged in. As it is, the immersion in parallel but believable worlds satisfies all my demands for vicarious experience, voyeurism and philosophic calithenics. I even enjoy the mechanics of writing, the dull timpani of the typewriter keys, the making of notes – many notes – and most seducttive of all: the buying of stationery. That the transmogrification of my beautiful thoughts into a grossly imperfect prose is always the end result doesn't faze me: all novels are only a version- there is no Platonic ideal. But I'd go further still: fiction is my way of thinking about and relating to the world; if I don't write I'm not engaged in any praxis, and lose all purchase.

The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.

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.

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

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 ...

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

If I were dying when I should've, say in the late sixties, when I thought my head would explode with howling misery, when every time their father opened his fat mouth I thought I'd have to kill him, then – then I would've written the girls affectionate letters, telling them of my sadness, and how much I loved them, and how sorry I was to be leaving them. Too late. They're here, they're grown-up, they're crap, and so we'll bicker towards oblivion.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I explained to him - as I withdrew the cup, ripped open the sachet and dunked the tea bag - that tea was an infusion, which meant that it was vital for the water to be actually boiling when it came into contact with the leaves. He looked at me furiously ... I had behaved like this many times before: taking Canute's stance in the path of the great surge of ill-brewed tepid tea that was inundating England.

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

But if this biography suggests a varied and sympathetic apprehension of the world, it was with a far darker palette that Céline came to paint his word-pictures when he began writing in the late 1920's. Straightforward fear adumbrates his invective, which - despite the reputation he would later earn as a rabid anti-Semite - is aimed against all classes and races of people with indiscriminate abandon. Indeed, if "Ulysses" is the great modernist novel most inspired by a desire for humanistic inclusion, then "Journey" is its antithesis: a stream of misanthropic consciousness, almost unrelieved by any warmth or fellow-feeling.

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

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

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.

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?

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Old age is, it occurs to Busner as he lies stranded on his side staring at the clock radio, a form of institutionalisation
it deprives you of your identity and supplies another, simpler one, it takes away your clothing and issues you with a uniform of slack-waisted trousers, threadbare jackets and moth-eaten cardigans, togs that are either coming from or going to charity shops. This done, it commits you to a realm at once confined and unbounded, an atrophying circuit of corridors that connect strip-lit and overheating rooms where you fade away your days reading day-old newspapers and specialist magazines
albeit not ones relating to the specialty that awaits you.

I loathe computers more and more, so I have one I can shut down and shelve like a book.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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]

This is the paradox for me: in failure alone is there any possibility of success. I don't think I'm alone in this - nor do I think it's an attitude that only prevails among people whose work is obviously 'creative'.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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'.

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.

Drug use and procrastination often go hand in tourniquet.

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.

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

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'.

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.

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.

I write because I feel driven to write. I write from a sense of inner necessity. I don't write for anything other than that.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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