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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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Will Self
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: September 26
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
West London Infirmary
William Woodard Self
Remember
Back
Displacement
Wanted
Integral
Everything
Activity
Writing
Fiction
Always
Write
Sense
Else

More quotes by 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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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
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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
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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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It is not that sport, over-indulged in, coarsens the mind it is that it dulls it.
Will Self
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Once the working classes were in chains, now they're in chain restaurants.
Will Self
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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
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If you believe something, you can have a morality that means something as well. You can feel recognized as an individual within the universe it can give meaning to who you are.
Will Self
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What more chilling indictment of the modern world is there than this: that the condition of the smartphone user is that of a dumb animal. Moooo!
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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What fiction offers us is an intimacy shorn of the messy contingencies of human existence - gender, race, class or age. Those moments of transcendence when we exclaim You know exactly what I mean! depend for much of their force on the anonymous character of the intimacy between writer and reader.
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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Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality.
Will Self
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Of course, with well-masticated food playing the role of social glue, it's absolutely essential that everyone clear their plate. Sod the starving kiddies in Africa - it's the overfed ones here we need to worry about.
Will Self
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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
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If the seventies were bulbous, and the eighties sharp, the nineties were nothing but bogus.
Will Self
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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
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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
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Whenever I produce my best work, it's always because I've spent time being idle. Something always emerges after nothing.
Will Self
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Schadenfreude is so nutritious.
Will Self