208 Quotes by Will Self

Vaughn’s vision is older, wiser and harder than Ritchie’s.

The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement – if you can’t deal with this, you needn’t apply.

It might be an idea for all literary critics to read the books they analyse aloud – it certainly helps to fix them in the mind, while providing a readymade seminar with your audience.

As for critical writing about modernism, its moments of lucidity are but fulgurations illuminating the dark and incomprehensible landscape of its subject’s unabashed difficulty.

There is a deep sadness to American poverty, greater than the sadness of any other kind. It’s because America has such an ideology of success.

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.

To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail – the disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content, and the leaden, halting sentences on the page always seems a dreadful falling short.

I always wanted to write fiction. Always. As far back as I can remember it’s been integral to my sense of myself – everything else was always a displacement activity.

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.