Quote

What fiction offers us is an intimacy shorn of the messy contingencies of human existence - gender, race, class or age. Those moments of transcendence when we exclaim You know exactly what I mean! depend for much of their force on the anonymous character of the intimacy between writer and reader.

Will Self

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Will Self
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: September 26
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
West London Infirmary
William Woodard Self
Moments
Depends
Transcendence
Character
Writer
Messy
Human
Fiction
Intimacy
Humans
Existence
Depend
Contingencies
Mean
Class
Gender
Shorn
Much
Race
Exactly
Exclaim
Age
Offers
Contingency
Force
Reader
Anonymous

More quotes by Will Self

Image
As a bookish adolescent, I sopped up texts as if I were blotting paper and they were fluid.
Will Self
Image
Some people have human muses - mine is a city. I feel a startling ambivalence towards London, but for better or worse my work has come utterly to depend upon it.
Will Self
Image
If the seventies were bulbous, and the eighties sharp, the nineties were nothing but bogus.
Will Self
Image
I loathe computers more and more, so I have one I can shut down and shelve like a book.
Will Self
Image
When George VI - displaying a flair for timing that was utterly absent in his lifetime - upped and died, the way was clear for her to inhabit her logical position as the eminence cerise, the bolster behind the throne.
Will Self
Image
I'd rather fiddle with my phone for precious seconds than neglect an apostrophe I'd rather insert a word laboriously keyed out than resort to predictive texting for a - acceptable to some - synonym.
Will Self
Image
Nowadays, my mood ungoverned, I'm free to think the most outrageous things, such as: might it not be a good idea to insist that drug companies give their preparations names that tell the user what they really do?
Will Self
Image
So I was smacked up on the Prime Minister's jet – big deal.
Will Self
Image
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.
Will Self
Image
Whatever respect photography may once have deserved is now superfluous in view of its own superfluity.
Will Self
Image
This is the paradox for me: in failure alone is there any possibility of success. I don't think I'm alone in this - nor do I think it's an attitude that only prevails among people whose work is obviously creative.
Will Self
Image
Mother sighed with exasperation. Look, there aren't any people in charge of death. When you die you move to another part of London, that's all there is to it. Period.
Will Self
Image
So heedless have we become of our own image that second-hand mobile phones now invariably come with a SIM card chock-full of discarded intimacies.
Will Self
Image
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.
Will Self
Image
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.
Will Self
Image
You don't need to know this - but here goes: due to some acquired infantilism, I feel compelled to fall asleep listening to the radio. On a good night, I'll push the frail barque of my psyche off into the waters of Lethe accompanied by the midnight newsreader - on a bad one, it's the shipping forecast.
Will Self
Image
Sometimes the crowd is the madness - at others it's the absence of the crowd that is.
Will Self
Image
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
Image
I do have a fantasy life in which I can grout bathrooms - but not for a living.
Will Self
Image
People tend to think of their lives as having a dramatic arc, because they read too much fiction.
Will Self