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Writing Quotes by Will Self
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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.
- The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply.
- 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.
- 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 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'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…
- 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…
- To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail - the disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content, and…
- Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceding day. This prevents those…
- You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the awareness that this…
More Writing Quotes
- Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. — Hannah Arendt
- I grew up in a working-class family, so I guess you could say I write from what I know. — Andrea Arnold
- I began writing at the age of 5, but there was a dark period between the ages of 8 and 16 when… — Margaret Atwood
- I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn't until I was… — Paul Auster
- Writing makes you feel that there is a reason to go on living. If I couldn't write, I would stop breathing. — Paul Auster
- In every song I write, whether it's a love song or a political song or a song about family, the one thing… — Billie Joe Armstrong
- There is good and mediocre writing within every genre. — Margaret Atwood
- No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only… — Wystan Hugh Auden