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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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Will Self
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: September 26
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
West London Infirmary
William Woodard Self
May
Believe
Always
Gathered
Cheerful
Wasn
Party
Death

More quotes by 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'.
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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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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.
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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
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Sometimes, when I hear people without experience of addiction blame addicts for their behaviour I feel like saying to them: You simply don't understand - how can a child be held responsible for doing such a dreadful thing to himself? But then again, at other times I have to acknowledge: it was done wilfully.
Will Self
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As a bookish adolescent, I sopped up texts as if I were blotting paper and they were fluid.
Will Self
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I write because I feel driven to write. I write from a sense of inner necessity. I don't write for anything other than that.
Will Self
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The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.
Will Self
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Just as the blurring between childhood and adulthood has produced the kidult, so the stretching of middle into old age has fostered another peculiar chimera: septuagenarians with apoptosis sporting the depeche mode.
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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A party full of 'likeable' people doesn't bear contemplating.
Will Self
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Schadenfreude is so nutritious.
Will Self
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Because I was a young man so, of course, I did get into fights. The last time I actually was in a fight, in the sense of throwing punches myself, was probably when I was at college, not since 1980. But I remember being attacked quite a few times in the '80s.
Will Self
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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
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The novelist, quite rightly, fears the psychoanalyst as both an enemy and a usurper.
Will Self
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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.
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 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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I enjoy doing very high mileages, partly out of masochism and also because I like to feel the shape of the landscape.
Will Self
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Always carry a notebook. And I mean always.
Will Self