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" 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. "

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" 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

" Death, the real simile for disease - for when we are ill, do we not always feel like we are dying, even if it's only a little? - remains, despite our secularism, the most metaphoricised phenomenon of all. "

Will Self

Death

Real

" 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. "

" 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. "

" From time to time, as if heaven-sent to annoy, someone will ask me if I'm self-disciplined when it comes to my work. I usually look witheringly at them and snarl, 'What do you think?' I mean, how do you imagine anyone writes a quarter of a million words a year for publication? "

Will Self

Think

Work

" 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. "

" Lives don't divide up into chapters. People don't just talk, while nothing's going on in their head, and then respond. You know, none of these things actually happen. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" You can always spot a 'television personality', even when they aren't actually on television, because they carry their 'made-up' persona in front of them, like some sort of baffler, or Ready Brek force field. Their reach for notoriety predicated on that fulsome mediocrity of talent detailed above has become frozen in their faces. "

" 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. "

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

Will Self

Possible

First

" 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 can't remember who it was who advocated that you should march with the left and dine with the right but I've often concurred, taking the view that I personify the great tolerance of Britain by consenting to being regally entertained. Besides, there is a degree of truth in the view that while the left are worthier, the right are wittier. "

" Who'd want to be a modernist writer in the English-speaking world? "

" As a species, we're addicted to the facile discrimination involved in saying that something or phenomenon is either 'this' or 'that' - how much more uncomfortable that it may well be 'the other'. "

" Is there anything more useless than a crouton? I sometimes wake up in the small hours with a start and realise that what's roused me is an overpowering urge to visit violence on its originator. "

Will Self

Small

Wake Up

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

" Certainly, for time out of mind, an obsessive dwelling on happier former days has been synonymous with getting older, while it was the juvenescent who rushed with open arms to embrace the future. "

" 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. "

" A very beautiful young woman once asked me to sign her breasts. That was back when I was a hip young thing - it's been all downhill since then. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

Damn

" As the render is to the building, and the blueprint to the machine, so sport is to social existence. "

" Like all right-listening folk, I am an implacable enemy of all muzak. "

Will Self

Enemy

I Am

" 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. "

" The main differences between contemporary English and American literature is that the baleful pseudo-professionalism imparted by all those crap M.F.A. writing programs has yet to settle like a miasma of standardization on the English literary scene. But it's beginning to happen. "

" 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. "