Will Self Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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.

  9 Copy quote

• 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 they polish it up and make it shine like a treasured heirloom.

  Will Self

  Thinking, Shining, Littles

  13 Copy quote

• 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

  22 Copy quote

• When anyone starts out to do something creative - especially if it seems a little unusual - they seek approval, often from those least inclined to give it. But a creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism - you learn this as you go on.

  Will Self

  Giving, Creative, Criticism

  "Falling short: seven writers reflect on failure" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. June 22, 2013.

  4 Copy quote

• Drug use and procrastination often go hand in tourniquet.

  Will Self

  Procrastination, Drug Use, Hands

  Will Self (2012). “Junk Mail: Reissued”, p.5, A&C Black

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  4 Copy quote

• Don't look back until you've written an entire draft.

  Will Self

  Looks, Great Writing, Written

  "Ten rules for writing fiction" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. February 19, 2010.

  6 Copy quote

• 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 autonomously for itself.

  Will Self

  Thinking, Stories, Vignettes

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  7 Copy quote

• Once the working classes were in chains, now they're in chain restaurants.

  Will Self

  Class, Restaurants, Chains

  5 Copy quote

• As a bookish adolescent, I sopped up texts as if I were blotting paper and they were fluid.

  Will Self

  Paper, Fluid, Ifs

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

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  5 Copy quote

• There can be no more thrilling idea of intimacy that connecting with someone through the agency of the written word. Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality. The reader I seek is a tautology, for he/she is simply exactly the person who wants to read what I have written...

  Will Self

  Race, Class, Ideas

  "Will Self". Interview with Sarah Kinson, www.theguardian.com. May 9, 2007.

  4 Copy quote

• There is a deep sadness to American poverty, greater than the sadness of any other kind. It's because America has such an ideology of success.

  Will Self

  Sadness, America, Poverty

  8 Copy quote

• I think the fundamental apprehension is that the city's an organism of some form, rather than being governed from above.

  Will Self

  Thinking, Cities, Fundamentals

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  6 Copy quote

• Continuous present is all we have, and stream of consciousness - which in a novel is arguably just as artificial as the stilted dialogue that you get in most conventional novels. They're all stratagems to try to get closer to the texture of lived life.

  Will Self

  Trying, Texture, Consciousness

  4 Copy quote

• It is not that sport, over-indulged in, coarsens the mind; it is that it dulls it.

  Will Self

  Sports, Mind

  "You may now turn over your papers" by Geoff Dyer, Mary Midgley and Will Self, www.theguardian.com. September 24, 2010.

  6 Copy quote

• With spectacular events taking up so much of the available anxiety quotient, we need to be constantly reminded of the more workaday threats to our mortality - threats that, while they may also be functions of human error, have become so ubiquitous that we've begun to apprehend them as natural phenomena.

  Will Self

  Errors, Anxiety, Events

  8 Copy quote

• 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; it makes me suspect that they favour the word over the world it should describe. Such scribes fall victim too easily to the solecism of equating style with morality.

  Will Self

  Fall, Style, Fiction

  "Incidents along the road" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. February 6, 2009.

  10 Copy quote

• 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 whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact opposite: British fiction is cool, American naff.

  Will Self

  Greatness, Thinking, Opposites

  "All pleasant and correct". www.theguardian.com. June 30, 1996.

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  7 Copy quote

• Wealth is a form of power in our society. With great power comes great responsibility. If you have too much wealth, ipso facto, you have too much power - therefore you have too much responsibility - and you're a kind of dictator.

  Will Self

  Responsibility, Too Much Power, Our Society

  "The Moral Maze" on BBC Radio 4, October 01, 2008.

  5 Copy quote

• Without a shadow of doubt, Trafalgar Square has to be one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world.

  Will Self

  Space, Squares, Doubt

  4 Copy quote

• Certainly, for time out of mind, an obsessive dwelling on happier former days has been synonymous with getting older, while it was the juvenescent who rushed with open arms to embrace the future.

  Will Self

  Dwelling, Mind, Getting Older

  4 Copy quote

Page 2 of 6

First

← Prev

1

2

3

4

5

6

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin