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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: 63
Born: 1961
Born: September 26
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
West London Infirmary
William Woodard Self
Writing
Necessity
Driven
Inner
Write
Sense
Anything
Feel
Feels

More quotes by 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
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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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Drug use and procrastination often go hand in tourniquet.
Will Self
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I used to find myself goofed out in the street on drugs. And I had such a bad problem with addiction at the time that I didn't mind. I was dealing cocaine and shooting up a lot of cocaine. And that's not a good space to be in.
Will Self
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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
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The life of the professional writer - like that of any freelance, whether she be a plumber or a podiatrist - is predicated on willpower. Without it there simply wouldn't be any remuneration, period.
Will Self
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A party full of 'likeable' people doesn't bear contemplating.
Will Self
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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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...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
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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.
Will Self
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If you believe something, you can have a morality that means something as well. You can feel recognized as an individual within the universe it can give meaning to who you are.
Will Self
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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
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I have a healthy appetite for solitude. If you don't, you have no business being a writer.
Will Self
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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
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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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Once the working classes were in chains, now they're in chain restaurants.
Will Self
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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
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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
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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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A creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.
Will Self