Top 100 Will Self Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Modernism has a reputation for being a forbidding phenomenon: its visual arts disconcertingly non-representational, its literary efforts devoid of the consolations of plot and character – even its films, it’s argued, fall well short of that true desideratum: entertainment.”

— Will Self

52. “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

53. “I write as someone who has no more time for repressive Islam than he does for repressive Christianity or Judaism, but at least look at the face in the hijab – and try to imagine the one beneath the niqab – before you depersonalise its wearer.”

— Will Self

54. “The seventies were my fattest decade. Overall I think the seventies were distinctly bulbous. People looked chunky, typefaces were rounded, writing implements penile.”

— Will Self

55. “You were born out of death – and will collapse back into its entropic embrace. The future is yet to be born, the past is ashes – and the present expires even as we cradle it to our wanting breast.”

— Will Self

56. “Most of us have had that experience – at around puberty – of realising that, despite whatever efforts we put into our chosen sports, we will become at best competent.”

— Will Self

57. “Vaughn’s vision is older, wiser and harder than Ritchie’s.”

— Will Self

58. “Because I was a young man so, of course, I did get into fights. The last time I actually was in a fight, in the sense of throwing punches myself, was probably when I was at college, not since 1980. But I remember being attacked quite a few times in the ’80s.”

— Will Self

59. “I enjoy doing very high mileages, partly out of masochism and also because I like to feel the shape of the landscape.”

— Will Self

60. “Once the working classes were in chains, now they’re in chain restaurants.”

— Will Self

61. “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

62. “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

63. “It could be argued that every age gets the comfort savagery writer it deserves.”

— Will Self

64. “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.”

— Will Self

65. “As a writer, I’m not convinced that we are the best equipped to understand how we go about the business of literary production.”

— Will Self

66. “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

67. “The novelist, quite rightly, fears the psychoanalyst as both an enemy and a usurper.”

— Will Self

68. “The life of the professional writer – like that of any freelance, whether she be a plumber or a podiatrist – is predicated on willpower. Without it there simply wouldn’t be any remuneration, period.”

— Will Self

69. “Not only is the statistical madness an assault on individuality, it’s also one on temporality too. Statistics – even when accurate – are only an image of the past that can then be Photoshopped before being pasted on to the future.”

— Will Self

70. “I have a healthy appetite for solitude. If you don’t, you have no business being a writer.”

— Will Self

71. “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

72. “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

73. “If we bought everything on the Internet, our eyes and mouths and nostrils would probably begin to film over with a tegument – one initially tissue-thin and capable of being removed each morning, but which gradually thickened and hardened until we were imprisoned in our own tiny minds.”

— Will Self

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

— Will Self

75. “My novels tend to come about from a fusion of two big ideas, creating a critical mass that then fissions, throwing off hundreds of other particles, riffs, tropes and characters.”

— Will Self

76. “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

77. “I’m English enough to feel something of a gut-reaction to modernism, to continental philosophising and anything that smacks of a refusal to pay attention to the forensics: the empirical facts on the ground.”

— Will Self

78. “As a bookish adolescent, I sopped up texts as if I were blotting paper and they were fluid.”

— Will Self

79. “Don’t try it,” he said. The mutant was reading my mind. “You, boy, you’re a literary trainspotter...”

— Will Self

80. “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

81. “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

82. “Dan slept throughout – but a man who sleeps with his head lying on a phone table can never really sleep with a clean conscience.”

— Will Self

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

87. “If you believe something, you can have a morality that means something as well. You can feel recognized as an individual within the universe; it can give meaning to who you are.”

— Will Self

88. “Whenever I produce my best work, it’s always because I’ve spent time being idle. Something always emerges after nothing.”

— Will Self

89. “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

90. “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

91. “I think the fundamental apprehension is that the city’s an organism of some form, rather than being governed from above.”

— Will Self

92. “I loathe computers more and more, so I have one I can shut down and shelve like a book.”

— Will Self

93. “I prefer to write first drafts as soon as possible after waking, so that the oneiric inscape is still present to me.”

— Will Self

94. “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

95. “I think I now understand why it is that the young are so very nostalgic. They have so little by way of personal history that they polish it up and make it shine like a treasured heirloom.”

— Will Self

96. “So I was smacked up on the Prime Minister’s jet – big deal.”

— Will Self

97. “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

98. “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

99. “We’ve been watching your kind, noting it all down, putting it in our order pads while you snort in your trough. It may be fragmented, it may not be prettified, it may not be in the Grand Tradition, but let me tell you – it’s ours and we’re ready to publish!”

— Will Self

100. “Grove Health Center,” trilled the woman on the end of the line. She had the vocal automisation that comes to people whose job description might as well read: ‘Ceaseless repetition’.”

— Will Self