What fiction offers us is an intimacy shorn of the messy contingencies of human existence - gender, race, class or age. Those… — Will Self Copy Share Image
A creative life cannot be sustained by approval any more than it can be destroyed by criticism. — Will Self Copy Share Image
The life of the professional writer - like that of any freelance, whether she be a plumber or a podiatrist - is… — Will Self Copy Share Image
I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to… — Will Self Copy Share Image
Live life and write about life. Of the making of many books there is indeed no end, but there are more than… — Will Self Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
I think in retrospect that all those 'alternative'modes of living were little more than exercises in arrested development. — Will Self Copy Share Image
When anyone starts out to do something creative - especially if it seems a little unusual - they seek approval, often from… — Will Self Copy Share Image
The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply. — Will Self Copy Share Image
As the render is to the building, and the blueprint to the machine, so sport is to social existence. — Will Self Copy Share Image
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… — Will Self Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
The paradox of modernism is, writers make the decision to work with the continuous present, and to work with... stream of consciousness,… — Will Self Copy Share Image
It is fair to say that insofar as sport is taken seriously by those who play it, then to that extent their… — Will Self Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
I do have a fantasy life in which I can grout bathrooms - but not for a living. — Will Self Copy Share Image
Continuous present is all we have, and stream of consciousness - which in a novel is arguably just as artificial as the… — Will Self Copy Share Image
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. — Will Self Copy Share Image
“As my voice died away I became conscious of the voice of another woman two tables away. I couldn't hear what she was saying… — Will Self Copy Share Image
That tertiary education is under a sustained assault by a political and - it often seems - social consensus that equates all education with… — Will Self Copy Share Image
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… — Will Self Copy Share Image
What fiction offers us is an intimacy shorn of the messy contingencies of human existence - gender, race, class or age. Those moments of… — Will Self Copy Share Image
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… — Will Self Copy Share Image
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… — Will Self Copy Share Image
As a writer, I'm not convinced that we are the best equipped to understand how we go about the business of literary production. — Will Self Copy Share Image
“I explained to him - as I withdrew the cup, ripped open the sachet and dunked the tea bag - that tea was an… — Will Self Copy Share Image
There is something mysteriously powerful that can happen when young, inchoate minds come into contact with older and more worldly ones in a spirit… — Will Self Copy Share Image
It would seem that I, who never could make much sense of physics when I was at school, have now gained a strong sense… — Will Self Copy Share Image
