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Political activists of all stripes are usually a wacky bunch, and never more so than in a system like Britain's, where power is effected via the quiescence of the electorate as much as its convictions.

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
Much
Activist
Never
Britain
Like
Conviction
Effected
Bunch
Wacky
Usually
Electorate
System
Activists
Political
Stripes
Power
Convictions

More quotes by 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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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'm an anarchist. I'm implacably opposed to heirarchical systems of power and control. I also mistrust crowds, as they often operate according to their lowest common denominator. In terms of evolutionary psychology, the crowd is very close to a herd of stampeding wildebeest.
Will Self
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In my view the plangent artificiality of a lot of creative work results from the fact that the people who write novels, direct films and put on plays tend to read too many novels, watch too many films and go to too many plays.
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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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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I make no apology for preoccupying myself with architecture, television, conceptual art, restaurants and Jane Asher's cakes.
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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I think in retrospect that all those 'alternative'modes of living were little more than exercises in arrested development.
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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Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceeding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in . . . The edit.
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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Like all right-listening folk, I am an implacable enemy of all muzak.
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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So I was smacked up on the Prime Minister's jet – big deal.
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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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
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My novels tend to come about from a fusion of two big ideas, creating a critical mass that then fissions, throwing off hundreds of other particles, riffs, tropes and characters.
Will Self
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As a species, we're addicted to the facile discrimination involved in saying that something or phenomenon is either 'this' or 'that' - how much more uncomfortable that it may well be 'the other'.
Will Self
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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