Quote

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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Will Self
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: September 26
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
West London Infirmary
William Woodard Self
Three
Unless
Ideas
Minutes
Retains
Ever
Lose
Notebook
Mean
Memories
Carry
Writing
Loses
Committed
Always
Information
Memory
Term
Paper
Idea
Short

More quotes by Will Self

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As the render is to the building, and the blueprint to the machine, so sport is to social existence.
Will Self
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Continuous present is all we have, and stream of consciousness - which in a novel is arguably just as artificial as the stilted dialogue that you get in most conventional novels. They're all stratagems to try to get closer to the texture of lived life.
Will Self
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I do have a fantasy life in which I can grout bathrooms - but not for a living.
Will Self
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I'm an anarchist. I'm implacably opposed to heirarchical systems of power and control. I also mistrust crowds, as they often operate according to their lowest common denominator. In terms of evolutionary psychology, the crowd is very close to a herd of stampeding wildebeest.
Will Self
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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
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The fictional work is a kind of actor that wears a satirical garb but can put on other costumes as well.
Will Self
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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
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In our benighted age, when films about amusement park rides and electronic fidgets scoop the honours, perhaps Hollywood redux is the best we can hope for.
Will Self
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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
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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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Like all right-listening folk, I am an implacable enemy of all muzak.
Will Self
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People tend to think of their lives as having a dramatic arc, because they read too much fiction.
Will Self
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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
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I loathe computers more and more, so I have one I can shut down and shelve like a book.
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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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
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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
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I think in retrospect that all those 'alternative'modes of living were little more than exercises in arrested development.
Will Self
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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
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A creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.
Will Self