208 Quotes by Will Self

You were born out of death – and will collapse back into its entropic embrace. The future is yet to be born, the past is ashes – and the present expires even as we cradle it to our wanting breast.

Nowadays, my mood ungoverned, I’m free to think the most outrageous things, such as: might it not be a good idea to insist that drug companies give their preparations names that tell the user what they really do?

You may have gathered that I am not the most cheerful of revellers – some characterise me as the death and soullessness of any party but it wasn’t always so, believe me.

I have a healthy appetite for solitude. If you don’t, you have no business being a writer.

A very beautiful young woman once asked me to sign her breasts. That was back when I was a hip young thing – it’s been all downhill since then.

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.

If the government announced that it was going to allocate a vast tranche of education funding purely to the pupils at the best public schools, there would be a national outcry – and yet this is precisely what the Olympics represents in terms of sports funding.

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.

Lives don’t divide up into chapters. People don’t just talk, while nothing’s going on in their head, and then respond. You know, none of these things actually happen.