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. Will Self More Quotes by Will Self More Quotes From Will Self 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. Will Self phonescardshands 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 jobstwoyears The marvellous thing about writing, whether it be fiction or journalism, is that it is simultaneously the most intimate and the most anonymous of meetings between people. It is profoundly intimate in reaching into the psyche of another, at the same time as being devoid of social characteristics, cultural characteristics, economic characteristics. Will Self writingpeoplefiction 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. Will Self anxietylandpast Sometimes the crowd is the madness - at others it's the absence of the crowd that is. Will Self crowdsmadnesssometimes 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 trainingenvironmentpolitical Television is the same as the telephone, and the same as the World Wide Web for that matter. People who become obsessed by the peculiarities of these communications media have simply failed to adjust to the shock of the old. People who bleat on about the 'artistic' potential of television qua television are equally deluded. Will Self communicationmediapeople Sometimes it occurs to me that the job of a serious cultural critic mostly consists in telling the generality of people that their opinions - on films, on books, on all manner of widgets, gadgets and even the latest electronic fidgets - simply aren't up to scratch. Will Self jobsbookpeople Political activists of all stripes are usually a wacky bunch, and never more so than in a system like Britain's, where power is effected via the quiescence of the electorate as much as its convictions. Will Self stripesconvictionpolitical The fictional work is a kind of actor that wears a satirical garb but can put on other costumes as well. Will Self costumesactorskind It might be an idea for all literary critics to read the books they analyse aloud - it certainly helps to fix them in the mind, while providing a readymade seminar with your audience. Will Self mindbookideas It is fair to say that insofar as sport is taken seriously by those who play it, then to that extent their conduct in play - their ability to deal with loss or victory, their ability to meld strategic thinking and brute force - can be taken as a small-scale model of how they, or others like them, might behave in life. Will Self takenlosssports Without a shadow of doubt, Trafalgar Square has to be one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world. Will Self spacesquaresdoubt It could be argued that every age gets the comfort savagery writer it deserves. Will Self deserveagecomfort A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself. Will Self vignettesstoriesthinking There's a flip side to having prominent public intellectuals, which is that they start meddling in politics and often with quite disastrous results. Will Self flipresultssides 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. Will Self landscapedarkwriting Continuous present is all we have, and stream of consciousness - which in a novel is arguably just as artificial as the stilted dialogue that you get in most conventional novels. They're all stratagems to try to get closer to the texture of lived life. Will Self textureconsciousnesstrying 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? Will Self writingmeanthinking 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. Will Self writingrememberfiction
