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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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Will Self
Age: 62
Born: 1961
Born: September 26
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
West London Infirmary
William Woodard Self
Thinking
Organisms
Fundamental
Fundamentals
City
Cities
Rather
Apprehension
Form
Organism
Think
Governed

More quotes by Will Self

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I'm English enough to feel something of a gut-reaction to modernism, to continental philosophising and anything that smacks of a refusal to pay attention to the forensics: the empirical facts on the ground.
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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There is a deep sadness to American poverty, greater than the sadness of any other kind. It's because America has such an ideology of success.
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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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
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The only proper suit-and-tie job I've had in my life was the two years in the late 1980s when I ran a small corporate publishing company. I even had a Ford Sierra!
Will Self
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You can always spot a 'television personality', even when they aren't actually on television, because they carry their 'made-up' persona in front of them, like some sort of baffler, or Ready Brek force field. Their reach for notoriety predicated on that fulsome mediocrity of talent detailed above has become frozen in their faces.
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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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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A very beautiful young woman once asked me to sign her breasts. That was back when I was a hip young thing - it's been all downhill since then.
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 fictional work is a kind of actor that wears a satirical garb but can put on other costumes as well.
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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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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Life, it is true, can be grasped in all its confused futility merely by opening one's eyes and sitting passively, a spectator on the stands of history - but to understand the social processes and conflicts, the interplay between individual and group, even the physicality of human experience, we have need of small-scale models.
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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That tertiary education is under a sustained assault by a political and - it often seems - social consensus that equates all education with training for increased productivity, only makes academe a still more promising environment for a contrarian.
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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With spectacular events taking up so much of the available anxiety quotient, we need to be constantly reminded of the more workaday threats to our mortality - threats that, while they may also be functions of human error, have become so ubiquitous that we've begun to apprehend them as natural phenomena.
Will Self