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 More Quotes by Will Self More Quotes From Will Self 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. Will Self realwritingmean Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever. Will Self notebookmemoriesmean A creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism. Will Self creativecriticismapproval I'm an anarchist. I'm implacably opposed to heirarchical systems of power and control. I also mistrust crowds, as they often operate according to their lowest common denominator. In terms of evolutionary psychology, the crowd is very close to a herd of stampeding wildebeest. Will Self crowdspsychologycommon I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form. Will Self building-thingswritingthinking 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. Will Self childhoodpeculiarage The cynics are correct the sense of freewill is only that feeling which we have when we take the necessitated option that most appeals to us. Will Self appealsfeelings So I was smacked up on the Prime Minister's jet – big deal. Will Self ministersprimebigs In survey after survey, people report that the greatest dangers they face are, in this order: terrorist attack, plane crashes and nuclear accidents. This despite the fact that these three combined have killed fewer people in the past half-century than car accidents do in any given year. Will Self orderpastyears Some people have human muses - mine is a city. I feel a startling ambivalence towards London, but for better or worse my work has come utterly to depend upon it. Will Self londoncitiespeople The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply. Will Self solitarylife-iswriting The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon. Will Self horizonlibertyimagination 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. Will Self realsuccessfulwriting Schadenfreude is so nutritious. Will Self schadenfreude The whole aesthetics of computers very much feeds into my OCD. They fill my head with obsessionalities and my actions become very repetitive. It seems quite inimical to the dreamy state out of which fiction comes which seems so much less causally repetitive than the way one works on computers. Will Self actionwayfiction I have a healthy appetite for solitude. If you don't, you have no business being a writer. Will Self appetitehealthysolitude Why is Mr Universe always from Earth? Will Self mr-universeuniverseearth Whenever I produce my best work, it's always because I've spent time being idle. Something always emerges after nothing. Will Self working-itbest-workproduce With spectacular events taking up so much of the available anxiety quotient, we need to be constantly reminded of the more workaday threats to our mortality - threats that, while they may also be functions of human error, have become so ubiquitous that we've begun to apprehend them as natural phenomena. Will Self anxietyerrorsevents I can't remember who it was who advocated that you should march with the left and dine with the right but I've often concurred, taking the view that I personify the great tolerance of Britain by consenting to being regally entertained. Besides, there is a degree of truth in the view that while the left are worthier, the right are wittier. Will Self tolerancedegreesviews
