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: 62
Born: 1961
Born: September 26
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
West London Infirmary
William Woodard Self
Humans
Existence
Depend
Contingencies
Mean
Class
Gender
Shorn
Much
Race
Exactly
Exclaim
Age
Offers
Contingency
Force
Reader
Anonymous
Moments
Depends
Transcendence
Character
Writer
Messy
Human
Fiction
Intimacy

More quotes by Will Self

Image
I do have a fantasy life in which I can grout bathrooms - but not for a living.
Will Self
Image
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.
Will Self
Image
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.
Will Self
Image
Whenever I produce my best work, it's always because I've spent time being idle. Something always emerges after nothing.
Will Self
Image
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.
Will Self
Image
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.
Will Self
Image
It is not that sport, over-indulged in, coarsens the mind it is that it dulls it.
Will Self
Image
The cynics are correct the sense of freewill is only that feeling which we have when we take the necessitated option that most appeals to us.
Will Self
Image
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
Image
When anyone starts out to do something creative - especially if it seems a little unusual - they seek approval, often from those least inclined to give it. But a creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism - you learn this as you go on.
Will Self
Image
Whatever respect photography may once have deserved is now superfluous in view of its own superfluity.
Will Self
Image
...catching a glimpse of his rather hippyish form in a mirror, he wonders at this atavism of apparel, is it an inversion of foetal ontogeny, in which the phenotype passes through previous fashion stages? Soon there will be gaiters and gloves...I will probably die, he thinks, clad in animal skins.
Will Self
Image
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.
Will Self
Image
The marvellous thing about writing, whether it be fiction or journalism, is that it is simultaneously the most intimate and the most anonymous of meetings between people. It is profoundly intimate in reaching into the psyche of another, at the same time as being devoid of social characteristics, cultural characteristics, economic characteristics.
Will Self
Image
If the seventies were bulbous, and the eighties sharp, the nineties were nothing but bogus.
Will Self
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Vaughn's vision is older, wiser and harder than Ritchie's.
Will Self
Image
Is there anything more useless than a crouton? I sometimes wake up in the small hours with a start and realise that what's roused me is an overpowering urge to visit violence on its originator.
Will Self
Image
Like all right-listening folk, I am an implacable enemy of all muzak.
Will Self