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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Free Literature Study Guides
The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Will Self Quotes

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

So heedless have we become of our own image that second-hand mobile phones now invariably come with a SIM card chock-full of discarded intimacies.

– Will Self

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

Whatever respect photography may once have deserved is now superfluous in view of its own superfluity.

– Will Self

One of the most heartening phenomena in today’s Britain is the great diversity of the modern nerd – the nerd is out and proud, and while she may love ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ merchandise more than is strictly warranted, she is in every way to be cherished as an exemplar of cosmopolitanism and tolerance.

– Will Self

It could be argued that every age gets the comfort savagery writer it deserves.

– Will Self

The paradox of modernism is, writers make the decision to work with the continuous present, and to work with… stream of consciousness, as it’s called, for emotional reasons, and the main emotional reason is verisimilitude. I mean, this is what surprises people: Life is not in the simple past.

– Will Self

In survey after survey, people report that the greatest dangers they face are, in this order: terrorist attack, plane crashes and nuclear accidents. This despite the fact that these three combined have killed fewer people in the past half-century than car accidents do in any given year.

– Will Self

Sometimes, when I hear people without experience of addiction blame addicts for their behaviour, I feel like saying to them: ‘You simply don’t understand – how can a child be held responsible for doing such a dreadful thing to himself?’ But then again, at other times I have to acknowledge: it was done wilfully.

– Will Self

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

Most of us have had that experience – at around puberty – of realising that, despite whatever efforts we put into our chosen sports, we will become at best competent.

– Will Self

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

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

– Will Self

I am a regular, if not exactly enthusiastic, patron of my local bookshop. I try to buy at least some books there because I cling to the belief that it’s important to maintain those businesses which put a human face on the exchange of money for goods and services.

– Will Self

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

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

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

I don’t think in terms of that bizarre tautology ‘value for money’ in my literary and journalistic work – and nor will I in my academic role. However, if I don’t believe I’m helping my students towards a fuller and more empowering relationship with the world, then I’ll resign.

– Will Self

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

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

Not only is the statistical madness an assault on individuality, it’s also one on temporality too. Statistics – even when accurate – are only an image of the past that can then be Photoshopped before being pasted on to the future.

– Will Self

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

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

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

– Will Self

I do have a fantasy life in which I can grout bathrooms – but not for a living.

– Will Self

For myself, I haven’t been content to carry on producing books that merely strain against the conventions – as I’ve grown older, and realised that there aren’t that many books left for me to write, so I’ve become determined that they should be the fictive equivalent of ripping the damn corset off altogether and chucking it on the fire.

– Will Self

From time to time, as if heaven-sent to annoy, someone will ask me if I’m self-disciplined when it comes to my work. I usually look witheringly at them and snarl, ‘What do you think?’ I mean, how do you imagine anyone writes a quarter of a million words a year for publication?

– Will Self

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

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

Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.

– Will Self

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