Will Self

“Schadenfreude is so nutritious.”

— Will Self

Things are only boring if you are boring.

— Will Self

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

— Will Self

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

— Will Self

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

— Will Self

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

— Will Self

“Thought is a melody, Audrey thinks, while the body is an inert mechanism of cogs, springs, chains and ratchets...”

— Will Self

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

— Will Self

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

— Will Self

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

— Will Self

I think I now understand why it is that the young are so very nostalgic. They have so little by way of…

— 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…

— 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…

— Will Self

Is there anything more useless than a crouton? I sometimes wake up in the small hours with a start and realise that…

— Will Self

In our benighted age, when films about amusement park rides and electronic fidgets scoop the honours, perhaps Hollywood redux is the best…

— Will Self

Live life and write about life. Of the making of many books there is indeed no end, but there are more than…

— 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…

— Will Self

I am a regular, if not exactly enthusiastic, patron of my local bookshop. I try to buy at least some books there…

— 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…

— Will Self

Television is the same as the telephone, and the same as the World Wide Web for that matter. People who become obsessed…

— Will Self

The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the…

— Will Self

I like texting as much as the next kidult - and embrace it as yet more evidence, along with email, that we…

— 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.…

— Will Self

There can be no more thrilling idea of intimacy that connecting with someone through the agency of the written word. Here we…

— Will Self

“The book was thick and red. It was almost thicker than it was wide, a thickness that somehow enhanced its bookishness. It…

— Will Self

Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceeding day.…

— Will Self

“Old age is, it occurs to Busner as he lies stranded on his side staring at the clock radio, a form of…

— Will Self

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

— Will Self

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

— Will Self

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

— Will Self

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

— 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

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

— Will Self

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

— Will Self

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

— 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

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

— Will Self

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

— 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

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

— Will Self