Will Self
Will Self
William Woodard Selfis an English novelist, journalist, political commentator and television personality...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth26 September 1961
bathroom fantasy fantasy-life
I do have a fantasy life in which I can grout bathrooms - but not for a living.
sports machines building
As the render is to the building, and the blueprint to the machine, so sport is to social existence.
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.
powerful creative intellectual
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.
paper fluid ifs
As a bookish adolescent, I sopped up texts as if I were blotting paper and they were fluid.
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.
worry essentials glue
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.
exercise thinking development
I think in retrospect that all those 'alternative'modes of living were little more than exercises in arrested development.
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.
race class ideas
There can be no more thrilling idea of intimacy that connecting with someone through the agency of the written word. Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality. The reader I seek is a tautology, for he/she is simply...the person who wants to read what I have written.
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.
sports mind
It is not that sport, over-indulged in, coarsens the mind; it is that it dulls it.
art apology cake
I make no apology for preoccupying myself with architecture, television, conceptual art, restaurants and Jane Asher's cakes.
giving creative criticism
When anyone starts out to do something creative - especially if it seems a little unusual - they seek approval, often from those least inclined to give it. But a creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism - you learn this as you go on.