Will Self Quotes
You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the awareness that this ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you, no matter how successful and publicly lauded you become. It is intrinsic to the real business of writing and should be cherished.
Quotes to Explore
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'Yellow Moon' was a poem. My wife at the time, Joel - she's dead now - it was our 25th anniversary. She had the chance to go on a cruise with her sister. And I'm home with the kids and looking up, and I saw the big moon, and I just started writing.
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I was always a real athletic kid. Then when I got older, I just figured it was part of life to keep training.
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I taught English and history, so my education for that really helped prepare me for writing historical fiction.
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I don't know how old I was when I started writing books. But, I was born in 1931, and I wrote my first book in 1961.
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I love writing songs.
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I think that the idea that I'm writing for many more people than I ever imagined has created a certain general responsibility that is literary and political. There's even pride involved, in not wanting to fall short of what I did before.
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The writing of the wise are the only riches our posterity cannot squander.
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It is only through such real-life daily struggles and challenges that a genuine sensitivity to human rights can be inculcated. This is a truth that is not limited to school education: it applies to all of us.
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Writing is my way of expressing - and thereby eliminating - all the various ways we can be wrong-headed.
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I worked initially in very low-budget independent films that I often wrote. My early work was all written by myself, and then I adapted 'Tsotsi,' so I was used to the writing process being, in a way, integral to my directing. I felt it really prepared me.
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When I was writing 'The Windup Girl' and 'Ship Breaker,' I was writing those simultaneously, so I was an unpublished writer, not really having that full sense that these books would go out in the world, that they would be successful, that there would be an audience and that there would be fans of those stories.
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I don't have specific music for when I'm writing. I'm usually listening to the same playlist or 'artist' before I arrive at the computer as when I'm walking somewhere after leaving the computer.
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People say, 'How does having kids change your writing? Do you see the world through their eyes?' No - you just become a faster songwriter... In the old days, you'd be like, 'Oh I'm gonna work on this song for a few days.'
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Just as I could tell you about my first Andre Norton novel or my first L'Engle or my first Asimov, I could write a paragraph about how each of these writers influenced me, my writing, and my thoughts, and do to this day.
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A failure is not always a mistake, it may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.
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When I first start writing a song, I usually write the title first, then the song, and I'll sing the song in my head and think of a visual of the song. If I can't think of a visual behind the song, I'll throw the song away.
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The way you dress or the car you drive or what you spend is to impress other people with how, I guess, successful and rich you are. But you're not, and you shouldn't, and who gives a damn what other people think anyway. So, that mentality, I think, is very destructive.
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If philosophy is practice, a demand to know the manner in which its history is to be studied is entailed: a theoretical attitude toward it becomes real only in the living appropriation of its contents from the texts.
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Therefore, I believe that we both have a heavy obligation to seek earnestly the path to peace. It is in response to that obligation that I am writing directly to you.
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I've never liked watching real-life couples play couples onscreen or onstage. It takes me out of the story.
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Usually, writing lyrics for me is like bleeding drop by drop from the forehead.
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We know what you want to accomplish... The real question is, 'what are you willing to push through the dip for?' What are you willing to stand up for, bleed for, commit to and generally be unreasonable about? Because that's what's going to actually get done.
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I'm happiest when I have something to focus my energy on.
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You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the awareness that this ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you, no matter how successful and publicly lauded you become. It is intrinsic to the real business of writing and should be cherished.
