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It might be an idea for all literary critics to read the books they analyse aloud - it certainly helps to fix them in the mind, while providing a readymade seminar with your audience.

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
Audience
Seminars
Read
Aloud
Idea
Literary
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Providing
Ideas
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Critics
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Seminar
Mind
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More quotes by 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.
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Things are only boring if you are boring.
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I do have a fantasy life in which I can grout bathrooms - but not for a living.
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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.
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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.
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Schadenfreude is so nutritious.
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Vaughn's vision is older, wiser and harder than Ritchie's.
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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.
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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.
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I make no apology for preoccupying myself with architecture, television, conceptual art, restaurants and Jane Asher's cakes.
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.
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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.
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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.
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A creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.
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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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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.
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Modernism has a reputation for being a forbidding phenomenon: its visual arts disconcertingly non-representational, its literary efforts devoid of the consolations of plot and character - even its films, it's argued, fall well short of that true desideratum: entertainment.
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In truth, even if they have an imperfect insight into their own methods, I still slightly mistrust writers of fiction who are assured literary critics it makes me suspect that they favour the word over the world it should describe. Such scribes fall victim too easily to the solecism of equating style with morality.
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Live life and write about life. Of the making of many books there is indeed no end, but there are more than enough books about books.
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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