Will Self Quotes

112 quotes in 1947 categories

• 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…
• Some people have human muses - mine is a city. I feel a startling ambivalence towards London, but for better or worse my work has…
• 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…
• The life of the professional writer - like that of any freelance, whether she be a plumber or a podiatrist - is predicated on willpower.…
• The high arts of literature and music stand in a curious relationship to one another, at once securely comfortable and deeply uneasy - rather like…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• In my view, the plangent artificiality of a lot of creative work results from the fact that the people who write novels, direct films and…
• My novels tend to come about from a fusion of two big ideas, creating a critical mass that then fissions, throwing off hundreds of other…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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.…
• A party full of 'likeable' people doesn't bear contemplating.
• I like texting as much as the next kidult - and embrace it as yet more evidence, along with email, that we live now in…
• When anyone starts out to do something creative - especially if it seems a little unusual - they seek approval, often from those least inclined…
• It is not that sport, over-indulged in, coarsens the mind; it is that it dulls it.
• Live life and write about life. Of the making of many books there is indeed no end, but there are more than enough books about…
• 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…
• As a bookish adolescent, I sopped up texts as if I were blotting paper and they were fluid.

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