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I write because I feel driven to write. I write from a sense of inner necessity. I don't write for anything other than that.
Will Self
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Will Self
Age: 62
Born: 1961
Born: September 26
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
West London Infirmary
William Woodard Self
Write
Sense
Anything
Feel
Feels
Writing
Necessity
Driven
Inner
More quotes by 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
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
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
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
People tend to think of their lives as having a dramatic arc, because they read too much fiction.
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
I have a healthy appetite for solitude. If you don't, you have no business being a writer.
Will Self
As a bookish adolescent, I sopped up texts as if I were blotting paper and they were fluid.
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
Whatever respect photography may once have deserved is now superfluous in view of its own superfluity.
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
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
Lives don't divide up into chapters. People don't just talk, while nothing's going on in their head, and then respond. You know, none of these things actually happen.
Will Self
The whole aesthetics of computers very much feeds into my OCD. They fill my head with obsessionalities and my actions become very repetitive. It seems quite inimical to the dreamy state out of which fiction comes which seems so much less causally repetitive than the way one works on computers.
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
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
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
Schadenfreude is so nutritious.
Will Self
Things are only boring if you are boring.
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