Top 100 Will Self Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Schadenfreude is so nutritious.”

— Will Self

2. “A creative life cannot be sustained by approval any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.”

— Will Self

3. “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

4. “Why is Mr Universe always from Earth?”

— Will Self

5. “Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality.”

— Will Self

6. “A very beautiful young woman once asked me to sign her breasts. That was back when I was a hip young thing – it’s been all downhill since then.”

— Will Self

7. “I’m very happy for whatever plaudits might come the way of my work, but I never ever sit down to write x with y in view – whether it’s a reader, a prize or a sale.”

— Will Self

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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.”

— Will Self

11. “Whatever respect photography may once have deserved is now superfluous in view of its own superfluity.”

— Will Self

12. “I do have a fantasy life in which I can grout bathrooms – but not for a living.”

— Will Self

13. “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

14. “Drug use and procrastination often go hand in tourniquet.”

— Will Self

15. “Don’t look back until you’ve written an entire draft...”

— Will Self

16. “Things are only boring if you are boring.”

— Will Self

17. “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

18. “The fictional work is a kind of actor that wears a satirical garb but can put on other costumes as well.”

— Will Self

19. “A party full of ‘likeable’ people doesn’t bear contemplating.”

— Will Self

20. “Without a shadow of doubt, Trafalgar Square has to be one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world.”

— Will Self

21. “Death, the real simile for disease – for when we are ill, do we not always feel like we are dying, even if it’s only a little? – remains, despite our secularism, the most metaphoricised phenomenon of all.”

— Will Self

22. “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

23. “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.”

— Will Self

24. “There is a deep sadness to American poverty, greater than the sadness of any other kind. It’s because America has such an ideology of success.”

— Will Self

25. “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

26. “Lives don’t divide up into chapters. People don’t just talk, while nothing’s going on in their head, and then respond. You know, none of these things actually happen.”

— Will Self

27. “Certainly, for time out of mind, an obsessive dwelling on happier former days has been synonymous with getting older, while it was the juvenescent who rushed with open arms to embrace the future.”

— Will Self

28. “The high arts of literature and music stand in a curious relationship to one another, at once securely comfortable and deeply uneasy – rather like a long-term marriage.”

— Will Self

29. “Always carry a notebook. And I mean always.”

— Will Self

30. “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

31. “The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement – if you can’t deal with this, you needn’t apply.”

— Will Self

32. “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.”

— Will Self

33. “I think in retrospect that all those ’alternative’modes of living were little more than exercises in arrested development.”

— Will Self

34. “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.”

— Will Self

35. “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

36. “I think it’s a misreading of Dostoevsky to think of him as a programmatic theist. He’s actually much closer to someone like William James. He’s actually a pragmatist.”

— Will Self

37. “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

38. “I make no apology for preoccupying myself with architecture, television, conceptual art, restaurants and Jane Asher’s cakes.”

— Will Self

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

— Will Self

40. “If the seventies were bulbous, and the eighties sharp, the nineties were nothing but bogus.”

— Will Self

41. “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

42. “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

43. “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

44. “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.”

— Will Self

45. “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

46. “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!”

— Will Self

47. “I am a regular, if not exactly enthusiastic, patron of my local bookshop. I try to buy at least some books there because I cling to the belief that it’s important to maintain those businesses which put a human face on the exchange of money for goods and services.”

— Will Self

48. “In our benighted age, when films about amusement park rides and electronic fidgets scoop the honours, perhaps Hollywood redux is the best we can hope for.”

— Will Self

49. “As the render is to the building, and the blueprint to the machine, so sport is to social existence.”

— Will Self

50. “Nowadays, my mood ungoverned, I’m free to think the most outrageous things, such as: might it not be a good idea to insist that drug companies give their preparations names that tell the user what they really do?”

— Will Self