Top 141 Quotes & Sayings by Will Self
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English author Will Self.
Last updated on November 8, 2024.
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.
Once the working classes were in chains, now they're in chain restaurants.
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.
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.'
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.
Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.
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.
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.
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'.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply.
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.
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.
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?
The fictional work is a kind of actor that wears a satirical garb but can put on other costumes as well.
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.
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.
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.
The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.
Most of us have had that experience - at around puberty - of realising that, despite whatever efforts we put into our chosen sports, we will become at best competent.
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.
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.
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.
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.
People tend to think of their lives as having a dramatic arc, because they read too much fiction.
I prefer to write first drafts as soon as possible after waking, so that the oneiric inscape is still present to me.
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.
What more chilling indictment of the modern world is there than this: that the condition of the smartphone user is that of a dumb animal. Moooo!
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.
Without a shadow of doubt, Trafalgar Square has to be one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world.
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.
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.
As for critical writing about modernism, its moments of lucidity are but fulgurations illuminating the dark and incomprehensible landscape of its subject's unabashed difficulty.
Sometimes the crowd is the madness - at others it's the absence of the crowd that is.
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.
Sometimes, when I hear people without experience of addiction blame addicts for their behaviour, I feel like saying to them: 'You simply don't understand - how can a child be held responsible for doing such a dreadful thing to himself?' But then again, at other times I have to acknowledge: it was done wilfully.
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.
Is there anything more useless than a crouton? I sometimes wake up in the small hours with a start and realise that what's roused me is an overpowering urge to visit violence on its originator.
Whatever respect photography may once have deserved is now superfluous in view of its own superfluity.
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.
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.
It could be argued that every age gets the comfort savagery writer it deserves.
As a bookish adolescent, I sopped up texts as if I were blotting paper and they were fluid.
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.
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.
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.
A party full of 'likeable' people doesn't bear contemplating.
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.
Who'd want to be a modernist writer in the English-speaking world?
The high arts of literature and music stand in a curious relationship to one another, at once securely comfortable and deeply uneasy - rather like a long-term marriage.
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.
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.
Like all right-listening folk, I am an implacable enemy of all muzak.
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.
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