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" The fictional work is a kind of actor that wears a satirical garb but can put on other costumes as well. "
Will Self
Work
Costumes
Kind
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" If we bought everything on the Internet, our eyes and mouths and nostrils would probably begin to film over with a tegument - one initially tissue-thin and capable of being removed each morning, but which gradually thickened and hardened until we were imprisoned in our own tiny minds. "
Will Self
Internet
Eyes
Own
" 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
" Of course, with well-masticated food playing the role of social glue, it's absolutely essential that everyone clear their plate. Sod the starving kiddies in Africa - it's the overfed ones here we need to worry about. "
Will Self
Everyone
Need
Worry
" The only proper suit-and-tie job I've had in my life was the two years in the late 1980s when I ran a small corporate publishing company. I even had a Ford Sierra! "
Will Self
Job
Late
Small
" People tend to think of their lives as having a dramatic arc, because they read too much fiction. "
Will Self
Too Much
Think
People
" 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
" 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
" Like all right-listening folk, I am an implacable enemy of all muzak. "
Will Self
Enemy
Am
I Am
" 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. "
Will Self
Job
Up
Serious
" 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'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
" 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. "
Will Self
Way
View
Work
" 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. "
Will Self
Literature
Writing
Beginning
" Live life and write about life. Of the making of many books there is indeed no end, but there are more than enough books about books. "
Will Self
More
Live Life
End
" The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact opposite: British fiction is cool, American naff. "
Will Self
Greatness
American
Cool
" 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. "
Will Self
Results
People
Creative
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
Me
First
" 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 for ever. "
Will Self
Memory
Three
You
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Will Self
World
Truth
Style
" There's a flip side to having prominent public intellectuals, which is that they start meddling in politics and often with quite disastrous results. "
Will Self
Results
Side
Politics
" As the render is to the building, and the blueprint to the machine, so sport is to social existence. "
Will Self
Building
Social
Machine
" It could be argued that every age gets the comfort savagery writer it deserves. "
Will Self
Age
Deserves
Savagery
" The novelist, quite rightly, fears the psychoanalyst as both an enemy and a usurper. "
Will Self
Quite
Enemy
Fears
" 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
" 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. "
Will Self
More
Stripes
Power