Top 50 Will Self Quotes

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.

People tend to think of their lives as having a dramatic arc, because they read too much fiction.

I can’t throw anything away. Anything. 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.

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.

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.

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.

Like all right-listening folk, I am an implacable enemy of all muzak.

I prefer to write first drafts as soon as possible after waking, so that the oneiric inscape is still present to me.

The main differences between contemporary English and American literature is that the baleful pseudo-professionalism imparted by all those crap M.F.A. writing programs has yet to settle like a miasma of standardization on the English literary scene. But it’s beginning to happen.

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?

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.

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.

Just as the blurring between childhood and adulthood has produced the kidult, so the stretching of middle into old age has fostered another peculiar chimera: septuagenarians with apoptosis sporting the depeche mode.

So heedless have we become of our own image that second-hand mobile phones now invariably come with a SIM card chock-full of discarded intimacies.

To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail – the disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content, and the leaden, halting sentences on the page always seems a dreadful falling short.

Death, the real simile for disease – for when we are ill, do we not always feel like we are dying, even if it’s only a little? – remains, despite our secularism, the most metaphoricised phenomenon of all.

The paradox of modernism is, writers make the decision to work with the continuous present, and to work with… stream of consciousness, as it’s called, for emotional reasons, and the main emotional reason is verisimilitude. I mean, this is what surprises people: Life is not in the simple past.

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.

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.

The novelist, quite rightly, fears the psychoanalyst as both an enemy and a usurper.

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.

To purposely concoct older characters of a sunny disposition would be as much of a solecism as deliberately fabricating arrhythmic blacks, spendthrift Jews, slacker Japanese and so on.

I loathe computers more and more, so I have one I can shut down and shelve like a book.

Sometimes, when I hear people without experience of addiction blame addicts for their behaviour, I feel like saying to them: ‘You simply don’t understand – how can a child be held responsible for doing such a dreadful thing to himself?’ But then again, at other times I have to acknowledge: it was done wilfully.

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.

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.

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.

It would seem that I, who never could make much sense of physics when I was at school, have now gained a strong sense of Einsteinian space-time. I am free of the nimbyism of now, and feel a strong kinship with both the dead and the unborn.

Without a shadow of doubt, Trafalgar Square has to be one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world.

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.

As a species, we’re addicted to the facile discrimination involved in saying that something or phenomenon is either ‘this’ or ‘that’ – how much more uncomfortable that it may well be ‘the other’.

You don’t need to know this – but here goes: due to some acquired infantilism, I feel compelled to fall asleep listening to the radio. On a good night, I’ll push the frail barque of my psyche off into the waters of Lethe accompanied by the midnight newsreader – on a bad one, it’s the shipping forecast.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What more chilling indictment of the modern world is there than this: that the condition of the smartphone user is that of a dumb animal. Moooo!

I do have a fantasy life in which I can grout bathrooms – but not for a living.

Whatever respect photography may once have deserved is now superfluous in view of its own superfluity.

As for critical writing about modernism, its moments of lucidity are but fulgurations illuminating the dark and incomprehensible landscape of its subject’s unabashed difficulty.

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.

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.

As the render is to the building, and the blueprint to the machine, so sport is to social existence.

There’s a flip side to having prominent public intellectuals, which is that they start meddling in politics and often with quite disastrous results.

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.

From time to time, as if heaven-sent to annoy, someone will ask me if I’m self-disciplined when it comes to my work. I usually look witheringly at them and snarl, ‘What do you think?’ I mean, how do you imagine anyone writes a quarter of a million words a year for publication?

The fictional work is a kind of actor that wears a satirical garb but can put on other costumes as well.

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.