Will Self
Will Self
William Woodard Selfis an English novelist, journalist, political commentator and television personality...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth26 September 1961
mother moving people
Mother sighed with exasperation. "Look, there aren't any "people in charge of death". When you die you move to another part of London, that's all there is to it. Period.
ifs seventies eighty
If the seventies were bulbous, and the eighties sharp, the nineties were nothing but bogus.
race class age
Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality.
age comfort savagery
It could be argued that every age gets the comfort savagery writer it deserves.
lust conviction epileptics
Lust was a positive high-tension cable, plugged into my core, activating a near-epileptic seizure of conviction that this was the one thing I had to do in life.
vision harder wiser
Vaughn's vision is older, wiser and harder than Ritchie's.
feelings roles television
What the British seem to like are television historians and naturalists, not public intellectuals. You can't help feeling that's because one supplies narrative and the other supplies facts, and the British are traditionally empiricists so they/we have a resistance to theory and to theoreticians playing too prominent a role in public life.
fall writing pages
To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail - the disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content, and the leaden, halting sentences on the page always seems a dreadful falling short.
past land anxiety
The future continues to preoccupy me as a reliable source of hopes, fears and anxieties, but increasingly the present seems to have no outstanding qualities of its own, being merely a way-station through which events travel to the vast shadow lands of the past.
crowds comfort strange
Ideologists of all kinds find a strange sort of comfort in the madness of the crowd; it confirms them in their suspicion that history, far from being made by the great mass of individuals - as Marx averred - is rather unmade by a single massive individual, a collective Other, who stands in stark contrast to you and he.
age amusement parks
In our benighted age, when films about amusement park rides and electronic fidgets scoop the honours, perhaps Hollywood redux is the best we can hope for.
fall style fiction
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.
sports taken loss
It is fair to say that insofar as sport is taken seriously by those who play it, then to that extent their conduct in play - their ability to deal with loss or victory, their ability to meld strategic thinking and brute force - can be taken as a small-scale model of how they, or others like them, might behave in life.
confused eye futility-of-life
Life, it is true, can be grasped in all its confused futility merely by opening one's eyes and sitting passively, a spectator on the stands of history - but to understand the social processes and conflicts, the interplay between individual and group, even the physicality of human experience, we have need of small-scale models.