Top Will Self Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Will Self Biography

William Woodard Self (born 26 September 1961) is an English novelist, journalist, political commentator and television personality.

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Will Self Quotes

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.

Become, Communication, Media, People, Television

It is not that sport, over-indulged in, coarsens the mind; it is that it dulls it.

Coarsens, Dulls, Mind, Sport, Sports

The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.

Horizon, Imagination, Let, Liberty, Traces

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.

Book, Enough, Life, Write, Writing

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.

Contact, Creative, Intellectual, Powerful, Young

Like all right-listening folk, I am an implacable enemy of all muzak.

Enemy, Folks, Implacable, Listening, Muzak

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.

Character, Force, Mean, Moments, Race, Transcendence

You may have gathered that I am not the most cheerful of revellers - some characterise me as the death and soullessness of any party but it wasn't always so, believe me.

Believe, Cheerful, Party, Revellers, Soullessness

Is there anything more useless than a crouton? I sometimes wake up in the small hours with a start and realise that what's roused me is an overpowering urge to visit violence on its originator.

Crouton, Hours, Realise, Useless, Violence, Wake Up

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.

Psychology, Crowds, Common, Herd, Crowd, Opposed

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.

Anxiety, Future, Land, Lands, Past, Travel

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.

Conviction, Political, Stripes, Usually, Via, Wacky

There's a flip side to having prominent public intellectuals, which is that they start meddling in politics and often with quite disastrous results.

Flip, Politics, Results, Sides

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!

Animal, Condition, Dumb, Smartphones

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.

Fact, People, Play, View, Views, Writing

Vaughn's vision is older, wiser and harder than Ritchie's.

Harder, Older, Vision, Wiser

Well, I wanted to be a philosopher, which is the idlest occupation in the world. I wanted to be involved in abstract thought, but because of various problems with the authorities I wasn't able to pull that one off. A lifetime of idleness in academia would have really suited me. So I was thrown out, as it were. Other than that, there seemed no possible idle occupations, so writing. . . although writing isn't exactly idleness. There's an enormous tension between indolence and languor.

Academia, Creativity, Idlest, Indolence, Philosophy, Writing

If the government announced that it was going to allocate a vast tranche of education funding purely to the pupils at the best public schools, there would be a national outcry - and yet this is precisely what the Olympics represents in terms of sports funding.

Allocate, Government, National, School, Sports

I like texting as much as the next kidult - and embrace it as yet more evidence, along with email, that we live now in the post-aural age, when an unsolicited phone call is, thankfully, becoming more and more understood to be an unspeakable social solecism, tantamount to an impertinent invasion of privacy.

Age, Email, Phones, Texting, Thankfully, Unsolicited

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.

Appeals, Feeling, Feelings, Sense, Take

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