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A party full of 'likeable' people doesn't bear contemplating.

Will Self

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Will Self
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: September 26
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
West London Infirmary
William Woodard Self
Bears
Full
Party
Doesn
People
Likeable
Contemplating
Bear

More quotes by Will Self

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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
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As a bookish adolescent, I sopped up texts as if I were blotting paper and they were fluid.
Will Self
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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 up to scratch.
Will Self
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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
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The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.
Will Self
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A creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.
Will Self
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I enjoy doing very high mileages, partly out of masochism and also because I like to feel the shape of the landscape.
Will Self
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The high arts of literature and music stand in a curious relationship to one another, at once securely comfortable and deeply uneasy - rather like a long-term marriage.
Will Self
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I do have a fantasy life in which I can grout bathrooms - but not for a living.
Will Self
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As the render is to the building, and the blueprint to the machine, so sport is to social existence.
Will Self
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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
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Of course, with well-masticated food playing the role of social glue, it's absolutely essential that everyone clear their plate. Sod the starving kiddies in Africa - it's the overfed ones here we need to worry about.
Will Self
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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
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The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply.
Will Self
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Sometimes the crowd is the madness - at others it's the absence of the crowd that is.
Will Self