Will Self Quotes

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

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. ~ Will Self

My body is both weapon and wound, predator and prey. I will self-destruct without any help. ~ Meg Haston

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

It's like that, isn't it? Just as Raymond Chandler says, 'The first kiss is dynamite, the second is routine and then you take her clothes off,' It had been like that for Alan in his previous affairs, even the extended one he had had with Sybil while Naomi was pregnant. Sure, Alan went on enjoying sex with Sybil, but at a fundamental level his lust for her had died the very first time he felt the shock of her pubic bone against his, and knew that they were now truly welded into one another. Alan was a one-thrust man. Not that he'd ever been exactly promiscuous. Perhaps it would have been better for all concerned if he had been. Rather, his sentiment self-absorption had managed to gild each of these terminal thrusts with enough self-regarding burnish for him to sustain the 'relationships' that legitimised them for months; and in at least two instances, for years. ~ 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

Radical acts of self-transformation do not occur spontaneously, meaningful change requires a specific and deliberative act of will. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

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

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

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

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

Schadenfreude is so nutritious. ~ Will Self

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 ... ~ Will Self

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

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

Whatever a man loves he inevitably clings to, and in order not to lose it he rejects everything that keeps him from it. So he who loves God cultivates pure prayer, driving out every passion that keeps him from it. He who drives out self-love, the mother of the passions, will with God's help easily rid himself of the rest, such as anger, irritation, rancor and so on. But he who is dominated by self-love is overpowered by the other passions, even against his will. Self-love is the passion of attachment to the body. ~ Maximus The Confessor

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

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

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. ~ 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

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 ~ Will Self

Robots will someday, or maybe, wake up. They may be really smart. They may be as creative, smart and capable as human beings, and fully conscious, and self discerning with free will. ~ David Hanson

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

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

If you argue and rankle and contradict, you may achieve a victory sometimes; but it will be an empty victory because you will never get your opponent's good will. ~ Dale Carnegie

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

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

Only by maintaining positive thoughts, by dispelling doubt and negativity, will you impress your desires upon the universe, making it bend to your will. ~ Stephen Richards

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

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

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. ~ Will Self

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

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. ~ 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. ~ 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

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. ~ Will Self

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

Mom put a note in my lunch again, I see ... Dear son, I hope you will study hard in summer school ... Do not look upon it as a punishment, but rather as a privilege ... We are very proud of you, and want you to have a good education. This note will self-destruct in five seconds. ~ Charles M. Schulz

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

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

Drug use and procrastination often go hand in tourniquet. ~ 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

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

Is religion subjective? Nay, its soul is in objectivity, in an Other whose Life is our true life, whose Love is our love, whose Joy is our joy, whose Peace is our peace, whose burdens are our burdens, whose Will is our will. Self is emptied into God, and God in-fills it. ~ Thomas Raymond Kelly

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

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

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

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'. ~ 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

For when you see that the universe cannot be distinguished from how you act upon it, there is neither fate nor free will, self nor other. There is simply one all-inclusive Happening, in which your personal sensation of being alive occurs in just the same way as the river flowing and the stars shining far out in space. There is no question of submitting or accepting or going with it, for what happens in and as you is no different from what happens as it. ~ Alan Watts

We have power over nothing except our will. ~ Michel De Montaigne

Why is Mr Universe always from Earth? ~ Will Self

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. ~ Will Self

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

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

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

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

Honesty is a moral virtue, a matter of the will. Honesty means willing the truth with the whole of your heart. This demands sacrifice. We have little hope of attaining honesty unless we realize how demanding it is. It demands sacrifice of self-will, self-image, the desire to win, and the comfort of being right.
The "honesty" often praised today is usually only emotional honesty with others, not intellectual honesty with one's self; only "letting it all hang out," not asking what is the real truth. Sometimes "honesty" is only a code word for shamelessness. Rarely does it mean the absolute, fanatical, selfless love of truth. ~ Peter Kreeft

This quote will self-destruct in ... 4 ... 3 ... 2 ... 1 ... Just kidding ... Or am I? ~ Craig Benzine

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

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

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

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

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

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. ~ Will Self

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. ~ Will Self

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

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

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

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

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

Man - a little, eccentric species of animal, which - fortunately - has its day; all on earth a mere moment, an incident, an exception without consequences, something of no importance to the general character of the earth; the earth itself, like every star, a hiatus between two nothingnesses, an event without plan, reason, will, self-consciousness, the worst kind of necessity, stupid necessity ... ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

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

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. ~ Will Self

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

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

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

When the pain that the little me creates for itself becomes intense enough, the ego will self-destruct. It has a self-destruct mechanism built in, fortunately, so eventually every ego dies. ~ Eckhart Tolle

Pride is characterized by "What do I want out of life?" rather than by "What would God have me do with my life?" It is self-will as opposed to God's will. It is the fear of man over the fear of God. ~ Ezra Taft Benson

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

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

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

Your skin is your skin. Your legs are your legs. Your hair is your hair. Your smile is your smile. Your past is your past. You can waste your life hating these things, but you may as well learn to accept them. Both routes are difficult and full of pain, but with acceptance, you will be happy one day, while with hatred, you never will. ~ Vironika Tugaleva

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

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. ~ 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

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

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