Will Self Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“In truth, even if they have an imperfect insight into their own methods, I still slightly mistrust writers of fiction who are assured literary critics; it makes me suspect that they favour the word over the world it should describe. Such scribes fall victim too easily to the solecism of equating style with morality.”

“Sometimes, when I hear people without experience of addiction blame addicts for their behaviour, I feel like saying to them: 'You simply don't understand - how can a child be held responsible for doing such a dreadful thing to himself?' But then again, at other times I have to acknowledge: it was done wilfully.”

“Television is the same as the telephone, and the same as the World Wide Web for that matter. People who become obsessed by the peculiarities of these communications media have simply failed to adjust to the shock of the old. People who bleat on about the 'artistic' potential of television qua television are equally deluded.”

“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.”

“Sometimes the crowd is the madness - at others it's the absence of the crowd that is.”

“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.”

“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.”

“That tertiary education is under a sustained assault by a political and - it often seems - social consensus that equates all education with training for increased productivity, only makes academe a still more promising environment for a contrarian.”

“Whatever respect photography may once have deserved is now superfluous in view of its own superfluity.”

“I think I now understand why it is that the young are so very nostalgic. They have so little by way of personal history that they polish it up and make it shine like a treasured heirloom.”