Will Self Quotes - Page 5

Quotes about:

• You can always spot a 'television personality', even when they aren't actually on television, because they carry their 'made-up' persona in front of them, like some sort of baffler, or Ready Brek force field. Their reach for notoriety predicated on that fulsome mediocrity of talent detailed above has become frozen in their faces.

  Will Self

  Force Fields, Personality, Mediocrity

  "Chris the saviour". www.theguardian.com. March 9, 1997.

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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 - even its films, it's argued, fall well short of that true desideratum: entertainment.

  Will Self

  Art, Fall, Character

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

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• That tertiary education is under a sustained assault by a political and - it often seems - social consensus that equates all education with training for increased productivity, only makes academe a still more promising environment for a contrarian.

  Will Self

  Political, Training, Environment

  "Why I said yes to Professor Self" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. February 22, 2012.

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• Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality.

  Will Self

  Race, Class, Age

  Interview with Sarah Kinson, www.theguardian.com. May 09, 2007.

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• 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 companies give their preparations names that tell the user what they really do?

  Will Self

  Thinking, Names, Ideas

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• 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 other supplies facts, and the British are traditionally empiricists so they/we have a resistance to theory and to theoreticians playing too prominent a role in public life.

  Will Self

  Feelings, Facts, Roles

  "Britain's intellectuals: leading thinkers have their say" by Alain de Botton, AC Grayling, Susie Orbach, Paul Gilroy, Will Self, Mary Beard, Brian Cox, Lionel Shriver, James Lovelock and Lisa Jardine, www.theguardian.com. May 7, 2011.

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• 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.

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• 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 company. I even had a Ford Sierra!

  Will Self

  Jobs, Years, Two

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

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• 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

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• 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 sense of the present to the future.

  Will Self

  Fall, Zeitgeist, Categories

  "In the beginning" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. June 16, 2007.

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• 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 of history - but to understand the social processes and conflicts, the interplay between individual and group, even the physicality of human experience, we have need of small-scale models.

  Will Self

  Confused, Eye, Futility Of Life

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

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• Lust was a positive high-tension cable, plugged into my core, activating a near-epileptic seizure of conviction that this was the one thing I had to do in life.

  Will Self

  Lust, Conviction, Epileptics

  Will Self (2013). “How the Dead Live”, p.67, A&C Black

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• 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 from being made by the great mass of individuals - as Marx averred - is rather unmade by a single massive individual, a collective Other, who stands in stark contrast to you and he.

  Will Self

  Comfort, Crowds, Strange

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• What fiction offers us is an intimacy shorn of the messy contingencies of human existence - gender, race, class or age. Those moments of transcendence when we exclaim "You know exactly what I mean!" depend for much of their force on the anonymous character of the intimacy between writer and reader.

  Will Self

  Character, Mean, Class

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

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• If we bought everything on the Internet, our eyes and mouths and nostrils would probably begin to film over with a tegument - one initially tissue-thin and capable of being removed each morning, but which gradually thickened and hardened until we were imprisoned in our own tiny minds.

  Will Self

  Morning, Eye, Mind

  "The Essential David Shrigley" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. September 10, 2010.

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• 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 of its own, being merely a way-station through which events travel to the vast shadow lands of the past.

  Will Self

  Past, Land, Anxiety

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• 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 for.

  Will Self

  Age, Hollywood, Amusement

  "Will Self considers the Coen brothers" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. February 11, 2011.

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• Always carry a notebook. And I mean always.

  Will Self

  Notebook, Mean

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

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• ...catching a glimpse of his rather hippyish form in a mirror, he wonders at this atavism of apparel, is it an inversion of foetal ontogeny, in which the phenotype passes through previous fashion stages? Soon there will be gaiters and gloves...I will probably die, he thinks, clad in animal skins.

  Will Self

  Fashion, Animal, Thinking

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• It might be an idea for all literary critics to read the books they analyse aloud - it certainly helps to fix them in the mind, while providing a readymade seminar with your audience.

  Will Self

  Book, Ideas, Mind

  "Tails of the unexpected" by Will Self, www.theguardian.com. October 16, 2009.

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• If the seventies were bulbous, and the eighties sharp, the nineties were nothing but bogus.

  Will Self

  Seventies, Eighty, Ifs

  Will Self (2012). “How the Dead Live”, p.318, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• We've clearly entered a period in which the analog of text is no longer important or relevant. All text will be electronic. I accept that fact. My house has thousands of books in it, and I've started to look at them completely differently. They now seem to me to be like antiquarian objects. Their use value has become negligible to me because I'm perfectly happy to read on an e-reader.

  Will Self

  Book, House, Important

  "Charles Ray". Interview with Will Self, www.interviewmagazine.com. January 21, 2013.

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• Because I was a young man so, of course, I did get into fights. The last time I actually was in a fight, in the sense of throwing punches myself, was probably when I was at college, not since 1980. But I remember being attacked quite a few times in the '80s.

  Will Self

  Fighting, College, Men

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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