Will Self Quotes

112 quotes in 1947 categories

• As a writer, I'm not convinced that we are the best equipped to understand how we go about the business of literary production.
• As the render is to the building, and the blueprint to the machine, so sport is to social existence.
• I do have a fantasy life in which I can grout bathrooms - but not for a living.
• I loathe computers more and more, so I have one I can shut down and shelve like a book.
• I prefer to write first drafts as soon as possible after waking, so that the oneiric inscape is still present to me.
• I write because I feel driven to write. I write from a sense of inner necessity. I don't write for anything other than that.
• It could be argued that every age gets the comfort savagery writer it deserves.
• Like all right-listening folk, I am an implacable enemy of all muzak.
• Once the working classes were in chains, now they're in chain restaurants.
• People tend to think of their lives as having a dramatic arc, because they read too much fiction.
• So heedless have we become of our own image that second-hand mobile phones now invariably come with a SIM card chock-full of discarded intimacies.
• Sometimes the crowd is the madness - at others it's the absence of the crowd that is.
• The fictional work is a kind of actor that wears a satirical garb but can put on other costumes as well.
• The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.
• The novelist, quite rightly, fears the psychoanalyst as both an enemy and a usurper.
• The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply.
• There's a flip side to having prominent public intellectuals, which is that they start meddling in politics and often with quite disastrous results.
• What more chilling indictment of the modern world is there than this: that the condition of the smartphone user is that of a dumb animal.…
• Whatever respect photography may once have deserved is now superfluous in view of its own superfluity.
• Without a shadow of doubt, Trafalgar Square has to be one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world.

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