Will Self Life Quotations

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.

The paradox of modernism is, writers make the decision to work with the continuous present, and to work with... stream of consciousness, as it's called, for emotional reasons, and the main emotional reason is verisimilitude. I mean, this is what surprises people: Life is not in the simple past.

The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply.

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.

I do have a fantasy life in which I can grout bathrooms - but not for a living.