Quotes from Will Self

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.

This is the paradox for me: in failure alone is there any possibility of success. I don't think I'm alone in this – nor do I think it's an attitude that only prevails among people whose work is obviously 'creative'.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

For myself, I haven't been content to carry on producing books that merely strain against the conventions - as I've grown older, and realised that there aren't that many books left for me to write, so I've become determined that they should be the fictive equivalent of ripping the damn corset off altogether and chucking it on the fire.

I've said it before - and I'll say it again: it always seems to me that we come to know our same-sex parents through the bodily and the involuntary; through a kind of fossicking of our own physical strata. As we come to resemble our fathers, so we re-encounter the individual who reared us.

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.

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

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.

A funny yet interesting read, Will Self knowa his stuff and must do a lot of deep research.

The only circumstances in which I would write a roman a clef would be if I'd lost my fucking car keys.

with the morbid realisation that his sexual being was a dull thing, a lifeless thing, a mass-produced marionette with chipped paint and fraying strings

He parked in a nearby street and walked out on to the bridge. Below him the lights of London spread away in a wash of low wattage, Their dimness gave the lie to the very vastless of the city. Bull heard its distant roar, its night-time sough, its terminal cough

If I were dying when I should've, say in the late sixties, when I thought my head would explode with howling misery, when every time their father opened his fat mouth I thought I'd have to kill him, then – then I would've written the girls affectionate letters, telling them of my sadness, and how much I loved them, and how sorry I was to be leaving them. Too late. They're here, they're grown-up, they're crap, and so we'll bicker towards oblivion.

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 forever.

Thought is a melody, Audrey thinks, while the body is an inert mechanism of cogs, springs, chains and ratchets...

Alan sensed Bull as liability, pure liability, triple liability. Alan was now having an affair with a man who had a cunt in the back of his leg. Worse still, the man was his patient. At the very least he would be struck off…

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'.

Dan slept throughout - but a man who sleeps with his head lying on a phone table can never really sleep with a clean conscience

PM está excesivamente organizada y se basa en gran medida en una ineficiente burocracia absurda.

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.