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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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Will Self
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: September 26
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
West London Infirmary
William Woodard Self
Produce
Best
Nothing
Work
Something
Emerges
Always
Idle
Time
Whenever
Spent

More quotes by Will Self

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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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There's a flip side to having prominent public intellectuals, which is that they start meddling in politics and often with quite disastrous results.
Will Self
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Once the working classes were in chains, now they're in chain restaurants.
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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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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As a writer, I'm not convinced that we are the best equipped to understand how we go about the business of literary production.
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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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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You may have gathered that I am not the most cheerful of revellers - some characterise me as the death and soullessness of any party but it wasn't always so, believe me.
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 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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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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Not only is the statistical madness an assault on individuality, it's also one on temporality too. Statistics - even when accurate - are only an image of the past that can then be Photoshopped before being pasted on to the future.
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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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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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
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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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There can be no more thrilling idea of intimacy that connecting with someone through the agency of the written word. Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality. The reader I seek is a tautology, for he/she is simply exactly the person who wants to read what I have written...
Will Self
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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.
Will Self
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The novelist, quite rightly, fears the psychoanalyst as both an enemy and a usurper.
Will Self