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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

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

More quotes by Will Self

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Whenever I produce my best work, it's always because I've spent time being idle. Something always emerges after nothing.
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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It is not that sport, over-indulged in, coarsens the mind it is that it dulls it.
Will Self
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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
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I do have a fantasy life in which I can grout bathrooms - but not for a living.
Will Self
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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
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In truth, even if they have an imperfect insight into their own methods, I still slightly mistrust writers of fiction who are assured literary critics it makes me suspect that they favour the word over the world it should describe. Such scribes fall victim too easily to the solecism of equating style with morality.
Will Self
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The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply.
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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A creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.
Will Self
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I can't remember who it was who advocated that you should march with the left and dine with the right but I've often concurred, taking the view that I personify the great tolerance of Britain by consenting to being regally entertained. Besides, there is a degree of truth in the view that while the left are worthier, the right are wittier.
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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Whatever respect photography may once have deserved is now superfluous in view of its own superfluity.
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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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 prefer to write first drafts as soon as possible after waking, so that the oneiric inscape is still present to me.
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.
Will Self
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Always carry a notebook. And I mean always.
Will Self
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Sometimes the crowd is the madness - at others it's the absence of the crowd that is.
Will Self
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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