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The novelist, quite rightly, fears the psychoanalyst as both an enemy and a usurper.
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
Novelist
Novelists
Fears
Quite
Enemy
Usurper
Psychoanalyst
Usurpers
Rightly
More quotes by Will Self
If the seventies were bulbous, and the eighties sharp, the nineties were nothing but bogus.
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
Modernism has a reputation for being a forbidding phenomenon: its visual arts disconcertingly non-representational, its literary efforts devoid of the consolations of plot and character - even its films, it's argued, fall well short of that true desideratum: entertainment.
Will Self
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
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.
Will Self
Don't look back until you've written an entire draft.
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
It might be an idea for all literary critics to read the books they analyse aloud - it certainly helps to fix them in the mind, while providing a readymade seminar with your audience.
Will Self
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
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
Without a shadow of doubt, Trafalgar Square has to be one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world.
Will Self
Always carry a notebook. And I mean always.
Will Self
It is not that sport, over-indulged in, coarsens the mind it is that it dulls it.
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
A creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.
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
I think in retrospect that all those 'alternative'modes of living were little more than exercises in arrested development.
Will Self
A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.
Will Self
As far as I can see, the history of experimental art in the twentieth century is intimately bound up with the experience of intoxification.
Will Self
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
