Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Will Self
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: September 26
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
West London Infirmary
William Woodard Self
Trying
Face
Hijab
Time
Faces
Repressive
Write
Judaism
Someone
Beneath
Doe
Islam
Look
Christianity
Looks
Least
Writing
Imagine
Wearer

More quotes by Will Self

Image
Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality.
Will Self
Image
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
Image
Just as the blurring between childhood and adulthood has produced the kidult, so the stretching of middle into old age has fostered another peculiar chimera: septuagenarians with apoptosis sporting the depeche mode.
Will Self
Image
I like texting as much as the next kidult - and embrace it as yet more evidence, along with email, that we live now in the post-aural age, when an unsolicited phone call is, thankfully, becoming more and more understood to be an unspeakable social solecism, tantamount to an impertinent invasion of privacy.
Will Self
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Lives don't divide up into chapters. People don't just talk, while nothing's going on in their head, and then respond. You know, none of these things actually happen.
Will Self
Image
It could be argued that every age gets the comfort savagery writer it deserves.
Will Self
Image
I'm going to end up like one of those old weirdos who lives in a network of tunnels burrowed through trash - yet I do not fear this.
Will Self
Image
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
Image
Without a shadow of doubt, Trafalgar Square has to be one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world.
Will Self
Image
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
Image
Nowadays, my mood ungoverned, I'm free to think the most outrageous things, such as: might it not be a good idea to insist that drug companies give their preparations names that tell the user what they really do?
Will Self
Image
If the seventies were bulbous, and the eighties sharp, the nineties were nothing but bogus.
Will Self
Image
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
Image
I prefer to write first drafts as soon as possible after waking, so that the oneiric inscape is still present to me.
Will Self
Image
I loathe computers more and more, so I have one I can shut down and shelve like a book.
Will Self
Image
The marvellous thing about writing, whether it be fiction or journalism, is that it is simultaneously the most intimate and the most anonymous of meetings between people. It is profoundly intimate in reaching into the psyche of another, at the same time as being devoid of social characteristics, cultural characteristics, economic characteristics.
Will Self
Image
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
Image
Sometimes it occurs to me that the job of a serious cultural critic mostly consists in telling the generality of people that their opinions - on films, on books, on all manner of widgets, gadgets and even the latest electronic fidgets - simply aren't up to scratch.
Will Self