Quote

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.

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
Seems
Seriously
Dreadful
Feel
Mental
Beautifully
Feels
Fail
Accurate
Writing
Pages
Attempt
Sonorous
Always
Failing
Page
Halting
Short
Falling
Leaden
Fall
Sentences
Painfully
Write
Content
Affecting

More quotes by Will Self

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Lust was a positive high-tension cable, plugged into my core, activating a near-epileptic seizure of conviction that this was the one thing I had to do in life.
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As a writer, I'm not convinced that we are the best equipped to understand how we go about the business of literary production.
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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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You can always spot a 'television personality', even when they aren't actually on television, because they carry their 'made-up' persona in front of them, like some sort of baffler, or Ready Brek force field. Their reach for notoriety predicated on that fulsome mediocrity of talent detailed above has become frozen in their faces.
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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 prefer to write first drafts as soon as possible after waking, so that the oneiric inscape is still present to me.
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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.
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I make no apology for preoccupying myself with architecture, television, conceptual art, restaurants and Jane Asher's cakes.
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Whatever respect photography may once have deserved is now superfluous in view of its own superfluity.
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A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.
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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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I loathe computers more and more, so I have one I can shut down and shelve like a book.
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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.
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There's a flip side to having prominent public intellectuals, which is that they start meddling in politics and often with quite disastrous results.
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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?
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Sometimes the crowd is the madness - at others it's the absence of the crowd that is.
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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.
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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.
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Always carry a notebook. And I mean always.
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Continuous present is all we have, and stream of consciousness - which in a novel is arguably just as artificial as the stilted dialogue that you get in most conventional novels. They're all stratagems to try to get closer to the texture of lived life.
Will Self