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" Many of my works fall into the category of 'Zeitgeist novels'. Yet I hope that they aren't only reportage, but also attempts to convey the sense of the present to the future. "
Will Self
Fall
Sense
Present
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" 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
America
Success
Poverty
" As the render is to the building, and the blueprint to the machine, so sport is to social existence. "
Will Self
Building
Social
Machine
" 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
Now
Mobile
Image
" 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
Phone
Word
Precious
" 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
History
Shine
Think
" 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. "
Will Self
Content
Me
Damn
" 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
Best
Become
Experience
" The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply. "
Will Self
Deal
Writing
Solitary
" 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. "
Will Self
Great
Diversity
Love
" 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
Business
Understand
Writer
" 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
Attention
Feel
Ground
" Who'd want to be a modernist writer in the English-speaking world? "
Will Self
World
Writer
Want
" 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
You
Creative
Criticism
" 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
Future
Travel
Shadow
" Sometimes the crowd is the madness - at others it's the absence of the crowd that is. "
Will Self
Others
Sometimes
Absence
" 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. "
Will Self
Live
Phone
Phone Call
" 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
Depend
City
Better
" 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
Control
Psychology
Power
" 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. "
Will Self
Value
Work
Think
" 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
Money
Belief
I Am
" Television is the same as the telephone, and the same as the World Wide Web for that matter. People who become obsessed by the peculiarities of these communications media have simply failed to adjust to the shock of the old. People who bleat on about the 'artistic' potential of television qua television are equally deluded. "
Will Self
Media
Matter
World
" 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. "
Will Self
Night
Good
Good Night
" 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
Age
Old
Childhood
" Without a shadow of doubt, Trafalgar Square has to be one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world. "
Will Self
Doubt
Square
Without
" 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
Become
Actions
Computers
" I loathe computers more and more, so I have one I can shut down and shelve like a book. "
Will Self
Computers
Down
I Can
" 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
Free
Think
Tell
" 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
Creating
Ideas
Two
" To purposely concoct older characters of a sunny disposition would be as much of a solecism as deliberately fabricating arrhythmic blacks, spendthrift Jews, slacker Japanese and so on. "
Will Self
Older
Much
Japanese
" 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
Know
Gender
Moments