Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Sometimes the crowd is the madness - at others it's the absence of the crowd that is.
Will Self
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Will Self
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: September 26
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
West London Infirmary
William Woodard Self
Others
Sometimes
Crowd
Crowds
Madness
Absence
More quotes by Will Self
As the render is to the building, and the blueprint to the machine, so sport is to social existence.
Will Self
Life, it is true, can be grasped in all its confused futility merely by opening one's eyes and sitting passively, a spectator on the stands of history - but to understand the social processes and conflicts, the interplay between individual and group, even the physicality of human experience, we have need of small-scale models.
Will Self
Whenever I produce my best work, it's always because I've spent time being idle. Something always emerges after nothing.
Will Self
The fictional work is a kind of actor that wears a satirical garb but can put on other costumes as well.
Will Self
It is fair to say that insofar as sport is taken seriously by those who play it, then to that extent their conduct in play - their ability to deal with loss or victory, their ability to meld strategic thinking and brute force - can be taken as a small-scale model of how they, or others like them, might behave in life.
Will Self
I write as someone who has no more time for repressive Islam than he does for repressive Christianity or Judaism, but at least look at the face in the hijab - and try to imagine the one beneath the niqab - before you depersonalise its wearer.
Will Self
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
I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form.
Will Self
As for critical writing about modernism, its moments of lucidity are but fulgurations illuminating the dark and incomprehensible landscape of its subject's unabashed difficulty.
Will Self
I think it's a misreading of Dostoevsky to think of him as a programmatic theist. He's actually much closer to someone like William James. He's actually a pragmatist.
Will Self
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
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
It could be argued that every age gets the comfort savagery writer it deserves.
Will Self
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
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
Vaughn's vision is older, wiser and harder than Ritchie's.
Will Self
Don't look back until you've written an entire draft.
Will Self
The future continues to preoccupy me as a reliable source of hopes, fears and anxieties, but increasingly the present seems to have no outstanding qualities of its own, being merely a way-station through which events travel to the vast shadow lands of the past.
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
Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceeding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in . . . The edit.
Will Self