"An English gentleman never shines his shoes, but then nor does a lazy bastard."
— Will Self (Dorian: An Imitation)

"I'm going to end up like one of those old weirdos who lives in a network of tunnels burrowed through trash - yet I do not fear this."
— Will Self

"The cynics are correct the sense of freewill is only that feeling which we have when we take the necessitated option that most appeals to us."
— Will Self

"We've been watching your kind, noting it all down, putting it in our order pads while you snort in your trough. It may be fragmented, it may not be prettified, it may not be in the Grand Tradition, but let me tell you--it's ours and we're ready to publish!"
— Will Self (Grey Area: And Other Stories)

"....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"
— Will Self (Cock & Bull)

"The Ridyadh Bodkin and the Kuala Lumpur Mushroom are positive Meccas for all kinds of daredevils-of this much I'm sure. Decadent Saudi princes pilot microlights through huge holes in their facades, while Malaysian spider men scale them using giant suckers in lieu of crampons. All these activities serve to demonstrate is that modernist megaliths have completely suborned the role of natural features in providing us with the essential and vertiginous perspective we require to comprehend accurately our ant-like status."
— Will Self

"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…"
— Will Self (Cock & Bull)

"The first touch came when Bull was lying full-length along the skirting board in the little six-foot vestibule that connected the bathroom to the kitchenette and the front door. He was the picture of powerlessness. His sensible, striped M&S shirt was rucked up around his back, his white, cotton Y- fronts dewlapped over the flat surfaces of his buttocks. Alan’s fine and tapering hand described an arc over him. He knelt as if stroking a cat. At the zenith of the arc Alan’s palm made contact with the small of Bull’s back. Bull stiffened bur did not cry out or resist…Oh, cruel deceiver! For how could Margoulis not have known that in this moment of breakdown, of cracking distress, the thing that Bull, of course, still desired most ardently, was the dry, sensible touch of a doctor. "
— Will Self (Cock & Bull)

"Alan was transported. Bull was all woman to him. Bull’s hysteria and now this tremulous capitulation. What could be more feminine? For Alan, they were like two crash survivors copulating amidst burning wreckage, deliriously affirming the very fact of living. And Bull’s leg, how beautifully it rubbed up against Alan, rounding off each one of his own thrusts!"
— Will Self (Cock & Bull)

"It’s like that, isn’t it? Just as Raymond Chandler says, ‘The first kiss is dynamite, the second is routine and then you take her clothes off,’ It had been like that for Alan in his previous affairs, even the extended one he had had with Sybil while Naomi was pregnant. Sure, Alan went on enjoying sex with Sybil, but at a fundamental level his lust for her had died the very first time he felt the shock of her pubic bone against his, and knew that they were now truly welded into one another. Alan was a one-thrust man. Not that he’d ever been exactly promiscuous. Perhaps it would have been better for all concerned if he had been. Rather, his sentiment self-absorption had managed to gild each of these terminal thrusts with enough self-regarding burnish for him to sustain the ‘relationships’ that legitimised them for months; and in at least two instances, for years. "
— Will Self (Cock & Bull)

"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"
— Will Self (Cock & Bull)

""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'."
— Will Self (Cock & Bull)

"Dan slept throughout - but a man who sleeps with his head lying on a phone table can never really sleep with a clean conscience"
— Will Self (Cock & Bull)

""Don't try it," he said. The mutant was reading my mind. "You, boy, you're a literary trainspotter...""
— Will Self (Cock & Bull)

"Morning came, and a grey wash of light found Dan, his cheek thrust hard in the carpeted right-angle of the bottom stair"
— Will Self (Cock & Bull)