208 Quotes by Will Self

I think it’s a misreading of Dostoevsky to think of him as a programmatic theist. He’s actually much closer to someone like William James. He’s actually a pragmatist.

Sometimes it occurs to me that the job of a serious cultural critic mostly consists in telling the generality of people that their opinions – on films, on books, on all manner of widgets, gadgets and even the latest electronic fidgets – simply aren’t up to scratch.

I write as someone who has no more time for repressive Islam than he does for repressive Christianity or Judaism, but at least look at the face in the hijab – and try to imagine the one beneath the niqab – before you depersonalise its wearer.

There is something mysteriously powerful that can happen when young, inchoate minds come into contact with older and more worldly ones in a spirit of intellectual and creative endeavour – if I believed in progress, I suppose that’s what I’d call it.

I write because I feel driven to write. I write from a sense of inner necessity. I don’t write for anything other than that.

I make no apology for preoccupying myself with architecture, television, conceptual art, restaurants and Jane Asher’s cakes.

As a writer, I’m not convinced that we are the best equipped to understand how we go about the business of literary production.

Modernism has a reputation for being a forbidding phenomenon: its visual arts disconcertingly non-representational, its literary efforts devoid of the consolations of plot and character – even its films, it’s argued, fall well short of that true desideratum: entertainment.

Most of us have had that experience – at around puberty – of realising that, despite whatever efforts we put into our chosen sports, we will become at best competent.