Quotes by Will Self

About Will Self:

William Woodard "Will" Self is a British author, journalist, political commentator and television personality.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

To purposely concoct older characters of a sunny disposition would be as much of a solecism as deliberately fabricating arrhythmic blacks, spendthrift Jews, slacker Japanese and so on.

Will Self

Sometimes it occurs to me that the job of a serious cultural critic mostly consists in telling the generality of people that their opinions - on films, on books, on all manner of widgets, gadgets and even the latest electronic fidgets - simply aren't...

Will Self

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

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

It would seem that I, who never could make much sense of physics when I was at school, have now gained a strong sense of Einsteinian space-time. I am free of the nimbyism of now, and feel a strong kinship with both the dead and the unborn.

Will Self

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

Will Self

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 t...

Will Self

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

Will Self

The main differences between contemporary English and American literature is that the baleful pseudo-professionalism imparted by all those crap M.F.A. writing programs has yet to settle like a miasma of standardization on the English literary scene. ...

Will Self

The novelist, quite rightly, fears the psychoanalyst as both an enemy and a usurper.

Will Self

Like all right-listening folk, I am an implacable enemy of all muzak.

Will Self

People tend to think of their lives as having a dramatic arc, because they read too much fiction.

Will Self

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

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

Will Self

I've said it before - and I'll say it again: it always seems to me that we come to know our same-sex parents through the bodily and the involuntary; through a kind of fossicking of our own physical strata. As we come to resemble our fathers, so we re...

Will Self

My novels tend to come about from a fusion of two big ideas, creating a critical mass that then fissions, throwing off hundreds of other particles, riffs, tropes and characters.

Will Self

Lives don't divide up into chapters. People don't just talk, while nothing's going on in their head, and then respond. You know, none of these things actually happen.

Will Self

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

A creative life cannot be sustained by approval any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.

Will Self

The postgrad at least knew enough to know that he would never know enough, lying under the stars which hung from the inky sky like bunches of inconceivably heavy, lustrous grapes, dusted with the yeast of eternity.

Will Self

I gain nothing but pleasure from writing fiction; short stories are foreplay, novellas are heavy petting – but novels are the full monte. Frankly, if I didn't enjoy writing novels I wouldn't do it – the world hardly needs any more and I can think...

Will Self

Author Bio

  • NameWill Self
  • Descriptionwriter, journalist
  • AliasesWilliam Woodard Self
  • BornSeptember 26, 1961
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionWriter; Journalist; Novelist
  • WorksThe Book Of Dave; Umbrella
  • AwardsBollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize; Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize