Quotes from Will Self

In Iowa the land is flat and the people are fat. Like petrol-driven bowling balls they roll across the plains, occasionaly slotting into the groove of a roadway, then rattling to a halt at fast-food joints where they are served with paper cups of 7 Up or Coke the size of oil drums, haystack hamburgers and stooks of fries.

She told him that every ring in the window for sale was a tale of woe, a ductile band of happiness that had been shaped easily into sorrow

Morning came, and a grey wash of light found Dan, his cheek thrust hard in the carpeted right-angle of the bottom stair

But mostly they just sat there, cemented in place by their secretions of chatter.

human intelligence is by definition what humans naturally do...

I don't as a rule hold much of a brief for television. In my experience, all too often it bowdlerises as much as popularises.

Tea chests full of the rotting correspondence of the parents Busner had never know, their serrated postcards, their now blotched but once creamy notepaper folded into thick envelopes that had been extravagantly franked and stamped. All of it he had foreseen himself unpacking, unsheathing and unfolding, so that the pressed flowers bloomed into dust as he read the missives for the first time since their long-gone recipients set the sheets to one side.

Whereas we, the dead, are the true inheritors of the Modern. The live lot assemble time into lazy decadences--ten-year periods of conspicuous attitudinising, which are only ever grasped in nostalgic retrospect.

In death there are smaller premises, littler ironies.

Oh, the future--it's always so fucking dated. For you, for me, for all of us. If only there were some way out of it.

There's nothing at all pleasant about smoking, and we naïve and immature wannabes were deluded by its social cachet, while simultaneously compelled by physical addiction. According to Carr, given the rapidity with which nicotine is absorbed by the human body, the smoker is almost constantly in a state of withdrawal — and thus mistakes the relief of these symptoms for the semblance of pleasure.

rumpling, rucking up, rummaging, pulling up and pulling down … Surprise-surprise! You shouldn't have … the familiar gifts torn open with fresh expectation

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?

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!

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.

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

As far as I can see, the history of experimental art in the twentieth century is intimately bound up with the experience of intoxification.

One of the most heartening phenomena in today's Britain is the great diversity of the modern nerd - the nerd is out and proud, and while she may love 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' merchandise more than is strictly warranted, she is in every way to be cherished as an exemplar of cosmopolitanism and tolerance.

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.

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

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.

I don't think in terms of that bizarre tautology 'value for money' in my literary and journalistic work - and nor will I in my academic role. However, if I don't believe I'm helping my students towards a fuller and more empowering relationship with the world, then I'll resign.

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.

In truth, even if they have an imperfect insight into their own methods, I still slightly mistrust writers of fiction who are assured literary critics; it makes me suspect that they favour the word over the world it should describe. Such scribes fall victim too easily to the solecism of equating style with morality.