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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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Will Self
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: September 26
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
West London Infirmary
William Woodard Self
Character
Critical
Riffs
Ideas
Tend
Fission
Come
Characters
Tropes
Mass
Fusion
Creating
Particles
Novel
Hundreds
Bigs
Novels
Two
Throwing

More quotes by 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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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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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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One of the most heartening phenomena in today's Britain is the great diversity of the modern nerd - the nerd is out and proud, and while she may love 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' merchandise more than is strictly warranted, she is in every way to be cherished as an exemplar of cosmopolitanism and tolerance.
Will Self
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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
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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
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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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Whatever respect photography may once have deserved is now superfluous in view of its own superfluity.
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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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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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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It is fair to say that insofar as sport is taken seriously by those who play it, then to that extent their conduct in play - their ability to deal with loss or victory, their ability to meld strategic thinking and brute force - can be taken as a small-scale model of how they, or others like them, might behave in life.
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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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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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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As a writer, I'm not convinced that we are the best equipped to understand how we go about the business of literary production.
Will Self
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I think in retrospect that all those 'alternative'modes of living were little more than exercises in arrested development.
Will Self
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I loathe computers more and more, so I have one I can shut down and shelve like a book.
Will Self
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Vaughn's vision is older, wiser and harder than Ritchie's.
Will Self
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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