Quote

People tend to think of their lives as having a dramatic arc, because they read too much fiction.

Will Self

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Will Self
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: September 26
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
West London Infirmary
William Woodard Self
Much
Think
Thinking
Arcs
People
Dramatic
Tend
Fiction
Read
Lives

More quotes by Will Self

Image
A party full of 'likeable' people doesn't bear contemplating.
Will Self
Image
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.
Will Self
Image
I think the fundamental apprehension is that the city's an organism of some form, rather than being governed from above.
Will Self
Image
The novelist, quite rightly, fears the psychoanalyst as both an enemy and a usurper.
Will Self
Image
Certainly, for time out of mind, an obsessive dwelling on happier former days has been synonymous with getting older, while it was the juvenescent who rushed with open arms to embrace the future.
Will Self
Image
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
Image
Once the working classes were in chains, now they're in chain restaurants.
Will Self
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Vaughn's vision is older, wiser and harder than Ritchie's.
Will Self
Image
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
Image
So I was smacked up on the Prime Minister's jet – big deal.
Will Self
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I'm English enough to feel something of a gut-reaction to modernism, to continental philosophising and anything that smacks of a refusal to pay attention to the forensics: the empirical facts on the ground.
Will Self
Image
When George VI - displaying a flair for timing that was utterly absent in his lifetime - upped and died, the way was clear for her to inhabit her logical position as the eminence cerise, the bolster behind the throne.
Will Self
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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