Will Self > Quotes

“An English gentleman never shines his shoes, but then nor does a lazy bastard.”
― Will Self, Dorian

“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

“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

“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

“You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the awareness that this ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you, no matter how successful and publicly lauded you become. It is intrinsic to the real business of writing and should be cherished.”
― Will Self

“Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in ... the edit.”
― Will Self

“Mother sighed with exasperation. "Look, there aren't any "people in charge of death". When you die you move to another part of London, that's all there is to it. Period.”
― Will Self, The Quantity Theory of Insanity

“Schadenfreude is so nutritious.”
― Will Self

“Surely it doesn't have to be this way? Stretching up the hill ahead of me, I begin to see all of my future relationships, bearing me on and up like some escalator of the fleshly. Each step is a man, a man who will penetrate me with his penis and his language, a man who will make a little private place with me, secure from the world, for a month, or a week, or a couple of years.

How much more lonely and driven is the serial monogamist than the serial killer?”
― Will Self, Grey Area

“The book was thick and red. It was almost thicker than it was wide, a thickness that somehow enhanced its bookishness. It was - to me aged 12 - quite clearly more of a book than most, if not all, of the paperbacks untidily stacked on the shelves of my father's study.”
― Will Self

“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

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

“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

“For the rest, silence or good music, not much food, a lot of solitude, walks on the Heath, the time to think while others... well, often fall apart. Not so bad, not so bad at all. Being queer and self-sufficient is the best present at this season.”
― Will Self, The Book of Dave: A Revelation of the Recent Past and the Distant Future

“A final word. Curious. Many years of reading many books has led me to a somewhat bizarre literary critical theory, namely that all significant texts are distinguished by the preponderance of a single word. In Alice’s adventures in Wonderland that word is ‘curious’ (In The Brothers Karamazov it’s ‘ecstasy’, but that needn’t concern us here.) The word ‘curious’ appears so frequently in Carroll’s text that it becomes a kind of tocsin awakening us from our reverie. But it isn’t the strangeness of Alice’s Wonderland that it reminds us of-it’s the bizarre incomprehensibility of our own.”
― Will Self

“As my voice died away I became conscious of the voice of another woman two tables away. I couldn't hear what she was saying to her set-faced male companion, but the tone was the same as my own, the exact same plangent composite of need and recrimination. I stared at them. Their faces said it all: his awful detachment, her hideous yearning. And as I looked around the cafe at couple after couple, eaching confronting one another over the marble table tops, I had the beginnings of an intimation.

Perhaps all this awful mismatching, this emotional grating, these Mexican stand-offs of trust and commitment, were somehow in the air. It wasn't down to individuals: me and him, Grace and John, those two over there... It was a contagion that was getting to all of us; a germ of insecurity that had lodged in all our breasts and was now fissioning frantically, creating a domino effect as relationship after relationship collapsed in a rubble of mistrust and acrimony.”
― Will Self, Grey Area

“Regard yourself as a small corporation of one. Take yourself off on team-building exercises (long walks). Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself while drinking a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under the desk. The following day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment.”
― Will Self

“....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

“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

“A funny yet interesting read, Will Self knowa his stuff and must do a lot of deep research.”
― Will Self, Liver: A Fictional Organ With a Surface Anatomy of Four Lobes

“PM está excesivamente organizada y se basa en gran medida en una ineficiente burocracia absurda.”
― Will Self, How the Dead Live

“But if this biography suggests a varied and sympathetic apprehension of the world, it was with a far darker palette that Céline came to paint his word-pictures when he began writing in the late 1920’s. Straightforward fear adumbrates his invective, which — despite the reputation he would later earn as a rabid anti-Semite — is aimed against all classes and races of people with indiscriminate abandon. Indeed, if “Ulysses” is the great modernist novel most inspired by a desire for humanistic inclusion, then “Journey” is its antithesis: a stream of misanthropic consciousness, almost unrelieved by any warmth or fellow-feeling.”
― Will Self

“I explained to him - as I withdrew the cup, ripped open the sachet and dunked the tea bag - that tea was an infusion, which meant that it was vital for the water to be actually boiling when it came into contact with the leaves. He looked at me furiously... I had behaved like this many times before: taking Canute's stance in the path of the great surge of ill-brewed tepid tea that was inundating England.”
― Will Self, Walking to Hollywood: Memories of Before the Fall

“Well, it's like this," began Mother, "When you die you go and live in another part of London. And that's it." ~ North London Book of the Dead”
― Will Self, The Quantity Theory of Insanity

“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

“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

“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