Will Self Quotes
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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.
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So I was smacked up on the Prime Minister's jet – big deal.
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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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Without a shadow of doubt, Trafalgar Square has to be one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world.
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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.
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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.
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Whenever I produce my best work, it's always because I've spent time being idle. Something always emerges after nothing.
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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.
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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.
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If the seventies were bulbous, and the eighties sharp, the nineties were nothing but bogus.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I used to find myself goofed out in the street on drugs. And I had such a bad problem with addiction at the time that I didn't mind. I was dealing cocaine and shooting up a lot of cocaine. And that's not a good space to be in.
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The novelist, quite rightly, fears the psychoanalyst as both an enemy and a usurper.
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Most of us have had that experience - at around puberty - of realising that, despite whatever efforts we put into our chosen sports, we will become at best competent.
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What the British seem to like are television historians and naturalists, not public intellectuals. You can't help feeling that's because one supplies narrative and the other supplies facts, and the British are traditionally empiricists so they/we have a resistance to theory and to theoreticians playing too prominent a role in public life.
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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!
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Wealth is a form of power in our society. With great power comes great responsibility. If you have too much wealth, ipso facto, you have too much power - therefore you have too much responsibility - and you're a kind of dictator.
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Sometimes the crowd is the madness - at others it's the absence of the crowd that is.
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I have a healthy appetite for solitude. If you don't, you have no business being a writer.
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It could be argued that every age gets the comfort savagery writer it deserves.
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Because I was a young man so, of course, I did get into fights. The last time I actually was in a fight, in the sense of throwing punches myself, was probably when I was at college, not since 1980. But I remember being attacked quite a few times in the '80s.