Will Self Quotes

112 quotes in 1947 categories

• It is fair to say that insofar as sport is taken seriously by those who play it, then to that extent their conduct in play…
• It might be an idea for all literary critics to read the books they analyse aloud - it certainly helps to fix them in the…
• Just as the blurring between childhood and adulthood has produced the kidult, so the stretching of middle into old age has fostered another peculiar chimera:…
• Life, it is true, can be grasped in all its confused futility merely by opening one's eyes and sitting passively, a spectator on the stands…
• Many of my works fall into the category of 'Zeitgeist novels'. Yet I hope that they aren't only reportage, but also attempts to convey the…
• Modernism has a reputation for being a forbidding phenomenon: its visual arts disconcertingly non-representational, its literary efforts devoid of the consolations of plot and character…
• Most of us have had that experience - at around puberty - of realising that, despite whatever efforts we put into our chosen sports, we…
• Not only is the statistical madness an assault on individuality, it's also one on temporality too. Statistics - even when accurate - are only an…
• Nowadays, my mood ungoverned, I'm free to think the most outrageous things, such as: might it not be a good idea to insist that drug…
• One of the most heartening phenomena in today's Britain is the great diversity of the modern nerd - the nerd is out and proud, and…
• Political activists of all stripes are usually a wacky bunch, and never more so than in a system like Britain's, where power is effected via…
• Sometimes it occurs to me that the job of a serious cultural critic mostly consists in telling the generality of people that their opinions -…
• Television is the same as the telephone, and the same as the World Wide Web for that matter. People who become obsessed by the peculiarities…
• That tertiary education is under a sustained assault by a political and - it often seems - social consensus that equates all education with training…
• The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness…
• The future continues to preoccupy me as a reliable source of hopes, fears and anxieties, but increasingly the present seems to have no outstanding qualities…
• The marvellous thing about writing, whether it be fiction or journalism, is that it is simultaneously the most intimate and the most anonymous of meetings…
• 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 small corporate publishing…
• To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail - the disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content, and…
• What the British seem to like are television historians and naturalists, not public intellectuals. You can't help feeling that's because one supplies narrative and the…

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