Will Self Quotes

17 Sourced Quotes

I have a healthy appetite for solitude. If you don't, you have no business being a writer.

Will Self
I make no apology for preoccupying myself with architecture, television, conceptual art, restaurants and Jane Asher's cakes.

Will Self
I think in retrospect that all those 'alternative'modes of living were little more than exercises in arrested development.

Will Self
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
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
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
Wake up. The avant-garde is dead. It's been marketed.

Will Self
Mother sighed with exasperation. "Look, there aren't any "people in charge of death". When you die you move to another part of London, that's all there is to it. Period.

Will Self
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
As far as I can see, the history of experimental art in the twentieth century is intimately bound up with the experience of intoxification.

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

Will Self
So I was smacked up on the Prime Minister's jet – big deal.

Will Self
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
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…the person who wants to read what I have written.

Will Self
Campaigning at a school in Enfield in 2001, Tony Blair was caught unawares by a feisty British Asian sixth-former. Suddenly this apparition arose before him, demolishing Blair's points as speedily as he tried to make them. This time around the New Labour machine haven't wanted to risk any of that. The Emperor has been ferried from Potemkin village to Potemkin hospital, and before he arrives a rigged rent-a-crowd of "ordinary people" are brought in to wave little flags. Journalists have been "embedded" - undoubtedly the cadres were hoping that these trusties would begin to sympathise with the man upon whom their jobs depended [and] they'd cease to notice how much of what he said was utter shit.

Will Self
Some people are born slack – others have slacking thrust upon them.

Will Self
The éminence cerise, the bolster behind the throne.

Will Self