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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Will Self Quotes

There’s a flip side to having prominent public intellectuals, which is that they start meddling in politics and often with quite disastrous results.

– Will Self

As a species, we’re addicted to the facile discrimination involved in saying that something or phenomenon is either ‘this’ or ‘that’ – how much more uncomfortable that it may well be ‘the other’.

– Will Self

What more chilling indictment of the modern world is there than this: that the condition of the smartphone user is that of a dumb animal. Moooo!

– Will Self

This is the paradox for me: in failure alone is there any possibility of success. I don’t think I’m alone in this – nor do I think it’s an attitude that only prevails among people whose work is obviously ‘creative’.

– Will Self

Sometimes the crowd is the madness – at others it’s the absence of the crowd that is.

– Will Self

Political activists of all stripes are usually a wacky bunch, and never more so than in a system like Britain’s, where power is effected via the quiescence of the electorate as much as its convictions.

– Will Self

It is fair to say that insofar as sport is taken seriously by those who play it, then to that extent their conduct in play – their ability to deal with loss or victory, their ability to meld strategic thinking and brute force – can be taken as a small-scale model of how they, or others like them, might behave in life.

– 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

As the render is to the building, and the blueprint to the machine, so sport is to social existence.

– Will Self

A very beautiful young woman once asked me to sign her breasts. That was back when I was a hip young thing – it’s been all downhill since then.

– Will Self

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

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

I’d rather fiddle with my phone for precious seconds than neglect an apostrophe; I’d rather insert a word laboriously keyed out than resort to predictive texting for a – acceptable to some – synonym.

– Will Self

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

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

You don’t need to know this – but here goes: due to some acquired infantilism, I feel compelled to fall asleep listening to the radio. On a good night, I’ll push the frail barque of my psyche off into the waters of Lethe accompanied by the midnight newsreader – on a bad one, it’s the shipping forecast.

– Will Self

Television is the same as the telephone, and the same as the World Wide Web for that matter. People who become obsessed by the peculiarities of these communications media have simply failed to adjust to the shock of the old. People who bleat on about the ‘artistic’ potential of television qua television are equally deluded.

– Will Self

Some people have human muses – mine is a city. I feel a startling ambivalence towards London, but for better or worse my work has come utterly to depend upon it.

– Will Self

I’m English enough to feel something of a gut-reaction to modernism, to continental philosophising and anything that smacks of a refusal to pay attention to the forensics: the empirical facts on the ground.

– Will Self

You may have gathered that I am not the most cheerful of revellers – some characterise me as the death and soullessness of any party but it wasn’t always so, believe me.

– Will Self

I can’t remember who it was who advocated that you should march with the left and dine with the right but I’ve often concurred, taking the view that I personify the great tolerance of Britain by consenting to being regally entertained. Besides, there is a degree of truth in the view that while the left are worthier, the right are wittier.

– Will Self

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

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

A party full of ‘likeable’ people doesn’t bear contemplating.

– Will Self

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

– Will Self

I’m an anarchist. I’m implacably opposed to heirarchical systems of power and control. I also mistrust crowds, as they often operate according to their lowest common denominator. In terms of evolutionary psychology, the crowd is very close to a herd of stampeding wildebeest.

– Will Self

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

– 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. But it’s beginning to happen.

– Will Self

There is something mysteriously powerful that can happen when young, inchoate minds come into contact with older and more worldly ones in a spirit of intellectual and creative endeavour – if I believed in progress, I suppose that’s what I’d call it.

– Will Self

Instead of looking at individual buildings, it makes more metaphorical sense to think of New York as one enormous chunk of masonry that has been cut up and carved away. It says, ‘This is the ultimate polis, through which humans move like nematodes.’

– Will Self

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