Will Self
Will Self
William Woodard Selfis an English novelist, journalist, political commentator and television personality...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth26 September 1961
enemy novelists usurpers
The novelist, quite rightly, fears the psychoanalyst as both an enemy and a usurper.
costumes actors kind
The fictional work is a kind of actor that wears a satirical garb but can put on other costumes as well.
party people bears
A party full of 'likeable' people doesn't bear contemplating.
crowds madness sometimes
Sometimes the crowd is the madness - at others it's the absence of the crowd that is.
real dying disease
Death, the real simile for disease - for when we are ill, do we not always feel like we are dying, even if it's only a little? - remains, despite our secularism, the most metaphoricised phenomenon of all.
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.
class restaurants chains
Once the working classes were in chains, now they're in chain restaurants.
thinking people too-much
People tend to think of their lives as having a dramatic arc, because they read too much fiction.
dwelling mind getting-older
Certainly, for time out of mind, an obsessive dwelling on happier former days has been synonymous with getting older, while it was the juvenescent who rushed with open arms to embrace the future.
enemy listening folks
Like all right-listening folk, I am an implacable enemy of all muzak.
book writing fire
For myself, I haven't been content to carry on producing books that merely strain against the conventions - as I've grown older, and realised that there aren't that many books left for me to write, so I've become determined that they should be the fictive equivalent of ripping the damn corset off altogether and chucking it on the fire.
believe thinking empowering
I don't think in terms of that bizarre tautology 'value for money' in my literary and journalistic work - and nor will I in my academic role. However, if I don't believe I'm helping my students towards a fuller and more empowering relationship with the world, then I'll resign.
thinking shining littles
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.
flip sides results
There's a flip side to having prominent public intellectuals, which is that they start meddling in politics and often with quite disastrous results.