Quote

The life of the professional writer - like that of any freelance, whether she be a plumber or a podiatrist - is predicated on willpower. Without it there simply wouldn't be any remuneration, period.

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
Without
Willpower
Life
Professional
Like
Period
Periods
Wouldn
Freelance
Writer
Remuneration
Simply
Predicated
Whether
Plumber

More quotes by Will Self

Image
Always carry a notebook. And I mean always.
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
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
Image
Once the working classes were in chains, now they're in chain restaurants.
Will Self
Image
It is not that sport, over-indulged in, coarsens the mind it is that it dulls it.
Will Self
Image
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
Image
I think in retrospect that all those 'alternative'modes of living were little more than exercises in arrested development.
Will Self
Image
I used to find myself goofed out in the street on drugs. And I had such a bad problem with addiction at the time that I didn't mind. I was dealing cocaine and shooting up a lot of cocaine. And that's not a good space to be in.
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
Many of my works fall into the category of Zeitgeist novels. Yet I hope that they aren't only reportage, but also attempts to convey the sense of the present to the future.
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
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
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
I think the fundamental apprehension is that the city's an organism of some form, rather than being governed from above.
Will Self
Image
Without a shadow of doubt, Trafalgar Square has to be one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world.
Will Self
Image
I always wanted to write fiction. Always. As far back as I can remember it's been integral to my sense of myself - everything else was always a displacement activity.
Will Self
Image
Schadenfreude is so nutritious.
Will Self
Image
Things are only boring if you are boring.
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
There is something mysteriously powerful that can happen when young, inchoate minds come into contact with older and more worldly ones in a spirit of intellectual and creative endeavour - if I believed in progress, I suppose that's what I'd call it.
Will Self