Quotes from Will Self

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

I explained to him - as I withdrew the cup, ripped open the sachet and dunked the tea bag - that tea was an infusion, which meant that it was vital for the water to be actually boiling when it came into contact with the leaves. He looked at me furiously... I had behaved like this many times before: taking Canute's stance in the path of the great surge of ill-brewed tepid tea that was inundating England.

Well, it's like this," began Mother, "When you die you go and live in another part of London. And that's it." ~ North London Book of the Dead

But in Ward 9 the air had a real quality, it clamped itself over your face like a pad of cotton wool, soaked through with the sweet chloroform of utter sadness. - Ward 9

A staccato script of letters and digits beamed from an alternate world. Then they ceased communicating altogether. and began to liase in dreams and nightmares.

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!

The book was thick and red. It was almost thicker than it was wide, a thickness that somehow enhanced its bookishness. It was - to me aged 12 - quite clearly more of a book than most, if not all, of the paperbacks untidily stacked on the shelves of my father's study.

The postgrad at least knew enough to know that he would never know enough, lying under the stars which hung from the inky sky like bunches of inconceivably heavy, lustrous grapes, dusted with the yeast of eternity.

After all, the Church had murdered itself, as with every decade more and more depressed dubiousness crept into its synods and convocations, until speaking in tongues, it beat its own skull in at the back of the vestry. Divorcees and devil-worshippers, schismatics, sodomites and self murderers -- they were all the same for the impotent figures who stood in the pulpit and peered down at pitiful congregations, their numbers winnowed out by satellite television and interest-free credit.

Don't try it," he said. The mutant was reading my mind. "You, boy, you're a literary trainspotter...

catching a glimpse of his rather hippyish form in a mirror, he wonders at this atavism of apparel, is it an inversion of foetal ontogeny, in which the phenotype passes through previous fashion stages? Soon there will be gaiters and gloves...I will probably die, he thinks, clad in animal skins.

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

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.

You don't need to know this - but here goes: due to some acquired infantilism, I feel compelled to fall asleep listening to the radio. On a good night, I'll push the frail barque of my psyche off into the waters of Lethe accompanied by the midnight newsreader - on a bad one, it's the shipping forecast.

Once the working classes were in chains, now they're in chain restaurants.

Ideologists of all kinds find a strange sort of comfort in the madness of the crowd; it confirms them in their suspicion that history, far from being made by the great mass of individuals - as Marx averred - is rather unmade by a single massive individual, a collective Other, who stands in stark contrast to you and he.

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.

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.

Sometimes the crowd is the madness - at others it's the absence of the crowd that is.

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.

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.

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

I can't throw anything away. Anything. 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.

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