Will Self Quotes

112 quotes in 1947 categories

• Drug use and procrastination often go hand in tourniquet.
• So I was smacked up on the Prime Minister's jet – big deal.
• 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…
• I have a healthy appetite for solitude. If you don't, you have no business being a writer.
• Lust was a positive high-tension cable, plugged into my core, activating a near-epileptic seizure of conviction that this was the one thing I had to…
• If the seventies were bulbous, and the eighties sharp, the nineties were nothing but bogus.
• The seventies were my fattest decade. Overall I think the seventies were distinctly bulbous. People looked chunky, typefaces were rounded, writing implements penile.
• 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…
• ...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,…
• Whenever I produce my best work, it's always because I've spent time being idle. Something always emerges after nothing.
• Always carry a notebook. And I mean always.
• Don’t look back until you’ve written an entire draft...
• 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…
• 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.
• What fiction offers us is an intimacy shorn of the messy contingencies of human existence - gender, race, class or age. Those moments of transcendence…
• 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…
• You may have gathered that I am not the most cheerful of revellers - some characterise me as the death and soullessness of any party…
• 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 -…
• 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…
• 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…

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