Quote

Certainly, for time out of mind, an obsessive dwelling on happier former days has been synonymous with getting older, while it was the juvenescent who rushed with open arms to embrace the future.

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
Certainly
Rushed
Arms
Synonymous
Days
Obsessive
Open
Dwelling
Getting
Happier
Future
Former
Mind
Embrace
Time
Older

More quotes by Will Self

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If we bought everything on the Internet, our eyes and mouths and nostrils would probably begin to film over with a tegument - one initially tissue-thin and capable of being removed each morning, but which gradually thickened and hardened until we were imprisoned in our own tiny minds.
Will Self
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Of course, with well-masticated food playing the role of social glue, it's absolutely essential that everyone clear their plate. Sod the starving kiddies in Africa - it's the overfed ones here we need to worry about.
Will Self
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I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form.
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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As far as I can see, the history of experimental art in the twentieth century is intimately bound up with the experience of intoxification.
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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In our benighted age, when films about amusement park rides and electronic fidgets scoop the honours, perhaps Hollywood redux is the best we can hope for.
Will Self
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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.
Will Self
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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.
Will Self
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Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality.
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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Television is the same as the telephone, and the same as the World Wide Web for that matter. People who become obsessed by the peculiarities of these communications media have simply failed to adjust to the shock of the old. People who bleat on about the 'artistic' potential of television qua television are equally deluded.
Will Self
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I have a healthy appetite for solitude. If you don't, you have no business being a writer.
Will Self
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In my view the plangent artificiality of a lot of creative work results from the fact that the people who write novels, direct films and put on plays tend to read too many novels, watch too many films and go to too many plays.
Will Self
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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.
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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I'm going to end up like one of those old weirdos who lives in a network of tunnels burrowed through trash - yet I do not fear this.
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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People tend to think of their lives as having a dramatic arc, because they read too much fiction.
Will Self
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I'm very happy for whatever plaudits might come the way of my work, but I never ever sit down to write x with y in view - whether it's a reader, a prize or a sale.
Will Self