Quote

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

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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
Book
Havens
Producing
Corset
Many
Haven
Grown
Corsets
Writing
Aren
Damn
Ripping
Fire
Content
Equivalent
Books
Determined
Realised
Write
Carry
Altogether
Left
Older
Strain
Chucking
Become
Merely
Conventions
Fictive

More quotes by Will Self

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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
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One of the most heartening phenomena in today's Britain is the great diversity of the modern nerd - the nerd is out and proud, and while she may love 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' merchandise more than is strictly warranted, she is in every way to be cherished as an exemplar of cosmopolitanism and tolerance.
Will Self
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The novelist, quite rightly, fears the psychoanalyst as both an enemy and a usurper.
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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There is something mysteriously powerful that can happen when young, inchoate minds come into contact with older and more worldly ones in a spirit of intellectual and creative endeavour - if I believed in progress, I suppose that's what I'd call it.
Will Self
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So heedless have we become of our own image that second-hand mobile phones now invariably come with a SIM card chock-full of discarded intimacies.
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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To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail - the disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content, and the leaden, halting sentences on the page always seems a dreadful falling short.
Will Self
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Death, the real simile for disease - for when we are ill, do we not always feel like we are dying, even if it's only a little? - remains, despite our secularism, the most metaphoricised phenomenon of all.
Will Self
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With spectacular events taking up so much of the available anxiety quotient, we need to be constantly reminded of the more workaday threats to our mortality - threats that, while they may also be functions of human error, have become so ubiquitous that we've begun to apprehend them as natural phenomena.
Will Self
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So I was smacked up on the Prime Minister's jet – big deal.
Will Self
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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
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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
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Whatever respect photography may once have deserved is now superfluous in view of its own superfluity.
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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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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Don't look back until you've written an entire draft.
Will Self
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The whole aesthetics of computers very much feeds into my OCD. They fill my head with obsessionalities and my actions become very repetitive. It seems quite inimical to the dreamy state out of which fiction comes which seems so much less causally repetitive than the way one works on computers.
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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Without a shadow of doubt, Trafalgar Square has to be one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world.
Will Self