Will Self
Will Self
William Woodard Selfis an English novelist, journalist, political commentator and television personality...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth26 September 1961
photography views may
Whatever respect photography may once have deserved is now superfluous in view of its own superfluity.
phones texting neglect
I'd rather fiddle with my phone for precious seconds than neglect an apostrophe; I'd rather insert a word laboriously keyed out than resort to predictive texting for a - acceptable to some - synonym.
writing trying islam
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.
sadness america poverty
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.
race class age
Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality.
hands phones cards
So heedless have we become of our own image that second-hand mobile phones now invariably come with a SIM card chock-full of discarded intimacies.
party people bears
A party full of 'likeable' people doesn't bear contemplating.
sports mind
It is not that sport, over-indulged in, coarsens the mind; it is that it dulls it.
life book writing
Live life and write about life. Of the making of many books there is indeed no end, but there are more than enough books about books.
beautiful hips back-when
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.
paper fluid ifs
As a bookish adolescent, I sopped up texts as if I were blotting paper and they were fluid.
greatness thinking opposites
The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact opposite: British fiction is cool, American naff.
convinced productions
As a writer, I'm not convinced that we are the best equipped to understand how we go about the business of literary production.
sports machines building
As the render is to the building, and the blueprint to the machine, so sport is to social existence.