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I'm very happy for whatever plaudits might come the way of my work, but I never ever sit down to write x with y in view - whether it's a reader, a prize or a sale.

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
Come
View
Writing
Views
Work
Whatever
Way
Whether
Never
Happy
Write
Sale
Ever
Prize
Might
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More quotes by Will Self

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A very beautiful young woman once asked me to sign her breasts. That was back when I was a hip young thing - it's been all downhill since then.
Will Self
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Wealth is a form of power in our society. With great power comes great responsibility. If you have too much wealth, ipso facto, you have too much power - therefore you have too much responsibility - and you're a kind of dictator.
Will Self
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You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the awareness that this ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you, no matter how successful and publicly lauded you become. It is intrinsic to the real business of writing and should be cherished.
Will Self
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In survey after survey, people report that the greatest dangers they face are, in this order: terrorist attack, plane crashes and nuclear accidents. This despite the fact that these three combined have killed fewer people in the past half-century than car accidents do in any given year.
Will Self
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I prefer to write first drafts as soon as possible after waking, so that the oneiric inscape is still present to me.
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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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
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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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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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Ideologists of all kinds find a strange sort of comfort in the madness of the crowd it confirms them in their suspicion that history, far from being made by the great mass of individuals - as Marx averred - is rather unmade by a single massive individual, a collective Other, who stands in stark contrast to you and he.
Will Self
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I am a regular if not exactly enthusiastic patron of my local bookshop. I try to buy at least some books there because I cling to the belief that it's important to maintain those businesses which put a human face on the exchange of money for goods and services.
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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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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I do have a fantasy life in which I can grout bathrooms - but not for a living.
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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I think I now understand why it is that the young are so very nostalgic. They have so little by way of personal history that they polish it up and make it shine like a treasured heirloom.
Will Self
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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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Schadenfreude is so nutritious.
Will Self
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I think the fundamental apprehension is that the city's an organism of some form, rather than being governed from above.
Will Self
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If we bought everything on the Internet, our eyes and mouths and nostrils would probably begin to film over with a tegument - one initially tissue-thin and capable of being removed each morning, but which gradually thickened and hardened until we were imprisoned in our own tiny minds.
Will Self