Quote

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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Will Self
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: September 26
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
West London Infirmary
William Woodard Self
Life
Often
Destroyed
Cannot
Criticism
Seems
Seek
Give
Especially
Inclined
Littles
Least
Sustained
Little
Creative
Approval
Giving
Anyone
Unusual
Something
Learn
Starts

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People tend to think of their lives as having a dramatic arc, because they read too much fiction.
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Once the working classes were in chains, now they're in chain restaurants.
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Like all right-listening folk, I am an implacable enemy of all muzak.
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It could be argued that every age gets the comfort savagery writer it deserves.
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Whatever respect photography may once have deserved is now superfluous in view of its own superfluity.
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The novelist, quite rightly, fears the psychoanalyst as both an enemy and a usurper.
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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.
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Vaughn's vision is older, wiser and harder than Ritchie's.
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As far as I can see, the history of experimental art in the twentieth century is intimately bound up with the experience of intoxification.
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In my view the plangent artificiality of a lot of creative work results from the fact that the people who write novels, direct films and put on plays tend to read too many novels, watch too many films and go to too many plays.
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If we bought everything on the Internet, our eyes and mouths and nostrils would probably begin to film over with a tegument - one initially tissue-thin and capable of being removed each morning, but which gradually thickened and hardened until we were imprisoned in our own tiny minds.
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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!
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The only proper suit-and-tie job I've had in my life was the two years in the late 1980s when I ran a small corporate publishing company. I even had a Ford Sierra!
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I like texting as much as the next kidult - and embrace it as yet more evidence, along with email, that we live now in the post-aural age, when an unsolicited phone call is, thankfully, becoming more and more understood to be an unspeakable social solecism, tantamount to an impertinent invasion of privacy.
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Death, the real simile for disease - for when we are ill, do we not always feel like we are dying, even if it's only a little? - remains, despite our secularism, the most metaphoricised phenomenon of all.
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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.
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I think in retrospect that all those 'alternative'modes of living were little more than exercises in arrested development.
Will Self
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The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact opposite: British fiction is cool, American naff.
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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.
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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