Will Self

You may have gathered that I am not the most cheerful of revellers - some characterise me as the death and soullessness…

— Will Self

Most of us have had that experience - at around puberty - of realising that, despite whatever efforts we put into our…

— Will Self

“The postgrad at least knew enough to know that he would never know enough, lying under the stars which hung from the…

— Will Self

When George VI - displaying a flair for timing that was utterly absent in his lifetime - upped and died, the way…

— 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…

— Will Self

I write as someone who has no more time for repressive Islam than he does for repressive Christianity or Judaism, but at…

— 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…

— Will Self

Certainly, for time out of mind, an obsessive dwelling on happier former days has been synonymous with getting older, while it was…

— Will Self

I've said it before - and I'll say it again: it always seems to me that we come to know our same-sex…

— 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…

— 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…

— Will Self

The marvellous thing about writing, whether it be fiction or journalism, is that it is simultaneously the most intimate and the most…

— 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…

— 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…

— 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,…

— 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…

— Will Self

To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail - the disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting…

— Will Self

“Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to…

— Will Self

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

— 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,…

— Will Self

The high arts of literature and music stand in a curious relationship to one another, at once securely comfortable and deeply uneasy…

— Will Self

In my view, the plangent artificiality of a lot of creative work results from the fact that the people who write novels,…

— Will Self

“A staccato script of letters and digits beamed from an alternate world. Then they ceased communicating altogether. and began to liase in…

— Will Self

I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to…

— Will Self

If the government announced that it was going to allocate a vast tranche of education funding purely to the pupils at the…

— Will Self

As far as I can see, the history of experimental art in the twentieth century is intimately bound up with the experience…

— Will Self

This is the paradox for me: in failure alone is there any possibility of success. I don't think I'm alone in this…

— Will Self

“He parked in a nearby street and walked out on to the bridge. Below him the lights of London spread away in…

— Will Self

“Grove Health Center," trilled the woman on the end of the line. She had the vocal automisation that comes to people whose…

— Will Self

If you believe something, you can have a morality that means something as well. You can feel recognized as an individual within…

— Will Self

The cynics are correct the sense of freewill is only that feeling which we have when we take the necessitated option that…

— Will Self

There is something mysteriously powerful that can happen when young, inchoate minds come into contact with older and more worldly ones in…

— Will Self

To purposely concoct older characters of a sunny disposition would be as much of a solecism as deliberately fabricating arrhythmic blacks, spendthrift…

— Will Self

Lust was a positive high-tension cable, plugged into my core, activating a near-epileptic seizure of conviction that this was the one thing…

— Will Self

The future continues to preoccupy me as a reliable source of hopes, fears and anxieties, but increasingly the present seems to have…

— 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…

— Will Self

A very beautiful young woman once asked me to sign her breasts. That was back when I was a hip young thing…

— Will Self

Just as the blurring between childhood and adulthood has produced the kidult, so the stretching of middle into old age has fostered…

— Will Self

As a species, we're addicted to the facile discrimination involved in saying that something or phenomenon is either 'this' or 'that' -…

— Will Self

“But in Ward 9 the air had a real quality, it clamped itself over your face like a pad of cotton wool,…

— Will Self