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. Will Self More Quotes by Will Self More Quotes From Will Self As far as I can see, the history of experimental art in the twentieth century is intimately bound up with the experience of intoxification. Will Self bounds century art I make no apology for preoccupying myself with architecture, television, conceptual art, restaurants and Jane Asher's cakes. Will Self cake apology art When anyone starts out to do something creative - especially if it seems a little unusual - they seek approval, often from those least inclined to give it. But a creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism - you learn this as you go on. Will Self creative criticism giving 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. Will Self addiction children people 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. Will Self too-much-power our-society responsibility There can be no more thrilling idea of intimacy that connecting with someone through the agency of the written word. Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality. The reader I seek is a tautology, for he/she is simply exactly the person who wants to read what I have written... Will Self race class ideas The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact opposite: British fiction is cool, American naff. Will Self greatness opposites thinking I think in retrospect that all those 'alternative'modes of living were little more than exercises in arrested development. Will Self exercise littles thinking 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 glue essentials worry In my view the plangent artificiality of a lot of creative work results from the fact that the people who write novels, direct films and put on plays tend to read too many novels, watch too many films and go to too many plays. Will Self views play writing A party full of 'likeable' people doesn't bear contemplating. Will Self party bears people 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. Will Self class character mean Don't look back until you've written an entire draft. Will Self great-writing written looks Once the working classes were in chains, now they're in chain restaurants. Will Self restaurants chains class Mother sighed with exasperation. "Look, there aren't any "people in charge of death". When you die you move to another part of London, that's all there is to it. Period. Will Self mother people moving People tend to think of their lives as having a dramatic arc, because they read too much fiction. Will Self people fiction thinking 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. Will Self trash tunnels ends You can always spot a 'television personality', even when they aren't actually on television, because they carry their 'made-up' persona in front of them, like some sort of baffler, or Ready Brek force field. Their reach for notoriety predicated on that fulsome mediocrity of talent detailed above has become frozen in their faces. Will Self force-fields mediocrity personality 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. Will Self roles feelings facts 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. Will Self pages writing fall
