Will Self Quotes
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.
Quotes to Explore
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About the most exciting thing a baby can do is burp - I've spent hours of my life holding a baby on my shoulder and patting its back, trying to loosen up a burp. Burping was probably invented to give the father something positive to do, since our chests are not equipped to allow us to do much else.
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It was failing part of my Ph.D. that led me into novel-writing. By then I was 29, had remarried and had a second baby. It struck me that I'd lost my path in life and I felt frustrated. That's when I started to write.
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I'm an American searching for some sort of parameters, a way of life - I'm looking for a slight formality, for a place where you can never be overdressed.
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I like to look for patterns in science and life. It's what I do.
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My view is that when in doubt, society should err on the side of life.
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I have not cared for money, and I enjoy working. Money comes my way. People work hard so they get enough money. Or they work hard so they don't have to work hard later in life. But though I don't need money, I still work hard because I like what I am doing.
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I've learned through experience that life is never that bad. The secret is just paying attention to how you feel and not letting anyone else dictate what in your heart you know is right.
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I guess I was a mom so late in life, my daughter was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
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For almost seventy years the life insurance industry has been a smug sacred cow feeding the public a steady line of sacred bull.
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As an assistant operations officer for a helicopter task force in Iraq, I saw my fellow Guardsmen and soldiers risk life and limb to maintain diesel fuel supply lines.
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If it is indeed impossible - or at least very difficult - to inhabit the consciousness of an animal, then in writing about animals there is a temptation to project upon them feelings and thoughts that may belong only to our own human mind and heart.
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Because I find writing painful, I try to get it over with as fast as possible. But I write every day, or I lose the thread.
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Mother had committed me for life. This is where I felt betrayed the most.
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My favorite book in life is 'A Wrinkle In Time,' which I read before high school. It was my first introduction into the meeting of science and spirit and the universe and big thoughts and all of those interesting New Age-y concepts. It made everything make sense to me and opened up my mind.
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I've always been singing all my life, but I started playing guitar when I was 19, and that was my final year in university, in law school. I think that happened when I started making a lot of friends who were in the independent music scene.
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Those who prepared for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.
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I've always viewed myself as a brand. When I started 10 years ago, that was very controversial. 'Marketing' and 'PR' were dirty words for the literary world, but that has changed. Once the book is finished, I want as many people as possible to read it.
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My live show is almost like a meditation. An emotional apex - that's what I want it to feel like.
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I don't think that there are very many good writers who don't live without a sense of tension. If they haven't got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives.
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The first song I learned on the guitar was a Kenny Chesney song called 'What I Need to Do'; it was just an easy song to play... and it was really cool to see that come full-circle a few years later and have him record a song that I was part of.
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If there is something more excellent than the truth, then that is God; if not, then truth itself is God.
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When we speak of ordinary unqualified knowledge, my thought is that we are implicitly relativizing to the standards imposed by our evolution-derived humanity. These are standards that determine when we consider it appropriate to store beliefs just as a human being, rather than in one's capacity as an expert of one or another sort. Such stored beliefs are to be available for later use in one's own thought or in testimony to others.
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I sound like such a tool, but becoming a mother has made me next-level confident. I've never felt more empowered.
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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.
