Will Self Quotes

112 quotes in 1947 categories

• In survey after survey, people report that the greatest dangers they face are, in this order: terrorist attack, plane crashes and nuclear accidents. This despite…
• The whole aesthetics of computers very much feeds into my OCD. They fill my head with obsessionalities and my actions become very repetitive. It seems…
• A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think…
• Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can…
• 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.
• Continuous present is all we have, and stream of consciousness - which in a novel is arguably just as artificial as the stilted dialogue that…
• For myself, I haven't been content to carry on producing books that merely strain against the conventions - as I've grown older, and realised that…
• From time to time, as if heaven-sent to annoy, someone will ask me if I'm self-disciplined when it comes to my work. I usually look…
• I always wanted to write fiction. Always. As far back as I can remember it's been integral to my sense of myself - everything else…
• I am a regular, if not exactly enthusiastic, patron of my local bookshop. I try to buy at least some books there because I cling…
• I don't think in terms of that bizarre tautology 'value for money' in my literary and journalistic work - and nor will I in my…
• I think I now understand why it is that the young are so very nostalgic. They have so little by way of personal history that…
• I write as someone who has no more time for repressive Islam than he does for repressive Christianity or Judaism, but at least look at…
• 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 predictive…
• 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 in…
• Ideologists of all kinds find a strange sort of comfort in the madness of the crowd; it confirms them in their suspicion that history, far…
• If the government announced that it was going to allocate a vast tranche of education funding purely to the pupils at the best public schools,…
• If we bought everything on the Internet, our eyes and mouths and nostrils would probably begin to film over with a tegument - one initially…
• In our benighted age, when films about amusement park rides and electronic fidgets scoop the honours, perhaps Hollywood redux is the best we can hope…
• In truth, even if they have an imperfect insight into their own methods, I still slightly mistrust writers of fiction who are assured literary critics;…

Browse Will Self Quotes by Category