Will Self Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceeding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in . . . The edit.

  Will Self

  Real, Mean, Writing

  "Will Self's rules for writers" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. February 22, 2010.

• 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 lose an idea for ever.

  Will Self

  Notebook, Memories, Mean

  Will Self's rules for writers, www.theguardian.com. February 22, 2010.

• 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 form.

  Will Self

  Writing, Thinking, Building Things

  "Will Self (1961- )", www.theguardian.com. July 22, 2008.

• 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 ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you, no matter how successful and publicly lauded you become. It is intrinsic to the real business of writing and should be cherished.

  Will Self

  Real, Writing, Successful

  "Will Self's rules for writers", www.theguardian.com. February 22, 2010.

• The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply.

  Will Self

  Writing, Life Is, Solitary

  "Ten rules for writing fiction (part two)". www.theguardian.com. February 20, 2010.

• The seventies were my fattest decade. Overall I think the seventies were distinctly bulbous. People looked chunky, typefaces were rounded, writing implements penile.

  Will Self

  Writing, Thinking, People

  Will Self (2012). “How the Dead Live”, p.74, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

• 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 stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself while drinking a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under the desk. The following day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment.

  Will Self

  Team, Party, Drinking

  "Ten rules for writing fiction (part two)" by Hilary Mantel, Michael Moorcock, Michael Morpurgo, Andrew Motion, Joyce Carol Oates, Annie Proulx, Philip Pullman, Ian Rankin, Will Self, Helen Simpson, Zadie Smith, Colm Tóibín, Rose Tremain, Sarah Waters, Jeanette Winterson, www.theguardian.com. February 19, 2010.

• 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 of various problems with the authorities I wasn't able to pull that one off. A lifetime of idleness in academia would have really suited me. So I was thrown out, as it were. Other than that, there seemed no possible idle occupations, so writing . . . although writing isn't exactly idleness. There's an enormous tension between indolence and languor.

  Will Self

  Philosophy, Writing, Creativity

• 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 books.

  Will Self

  Life, Book, Writing

  "Will Self's rules for writers" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. February 22, 2010.

• 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 witheringly at them and snarl, 'What do you think?' I mean, how do you imagine anyone writes a quarter of a million words a year for publication?

  Will Self

  Writing, Mean, Thinking

• 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 was always a displacement activity.

  Will Self

  Writing, Fiction, Remember

  "My Other Life" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. October 31, 2009.

• I prefer to write first drafts as soon as possible after waking, so that the oneiric inscape is still present to me.

  Will Self

  Writing, Firsts, Waking

• 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 the face in the hijab - and try to imagine the one beneath the niqab - before you depersonalise its wearer.

  Will Self

  Writing, Islam, Trying

• 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.

  Will Self

  Writing, Driven, Feels

• 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 view - whether it's a reader, a prize or a sale.

  Will Self

  Writing, Views, Might

• 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 between people. It is profoundly intimate in reaching into the psyche of another, at the same time as being devoid of social characteristics, cultural characteristics, economic characteristics.

  Will Self

  Writing, People, Fiction

• 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 put on plays tend to read too many novels, watch too many films and go to too many plays.

  Will Self

  Writing, Views, Play

  "It's a wild, Wilde world" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. July 4, 2003.

• To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail - the disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content, and the leaden, halting sentences on the page always seems a dreadful falling short.

  Will Self

  Fall, Writing, Pages

  "Falling short: seven writers reflect on failure" by Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Julian Barnes, Anne Enright, Howard Jacobson, Will Self and Lionel Shriver, www.theguardian.com. June 22, 2013.

• 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.

  Will Self

  Writing, Dark, Landscape

  "Constellation of Genius, 1922: Modernism Year One by Kevin Jackson - review" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. October 19, 2012.

• 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 there aren't that many books left for me to write, so I've become determined that they should be the fictive equivalent of ripping the damn corset off altogether and chucking it on the fire.

  Will Self

  Book, Writing, Fire

  "Will Self: modernism and me" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. August 3, 2012.

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin