208 Quotes by Will Self

I think the fundamental apprehension is that the city’s an organism of some form, rather than being governed from above.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think in retrospect that all those ’alternative’modes of living were little more than exercises in arrested development.

That tertiary education is under a sustained assault by a political and – it often seems – social consensus that equates all education with training for increased productivity, only makes academe a still more promising environment for a contrarian.

Because I was a young man so, of course, I did get into fights. The last time I actually was in a fight, in the sense of throwing punches myself, was probably when I was at college, not since 1980. But I remember being attacked quite a few times in the ’80s.

I used to find myself goofed out in the street on drugs. And I had such a bad problem with addiction at the time that I didn’t mind. I was dealing cocaine and shooting up a lot of cocaine. And that’s not a good space to be in.