Whatever respect photography may once have deserved is now superfluous in view of its own superfluity. Will Self Read Quote
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. Will Self Read Quote
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. Will Self Read Quote
In my view, the plangent artificiality of a lot of creative work results from the fact that the people who write novels, direct films and put on plays tend to read too many novels, watch too many films and go to too many plays. Will Self Read Quote
I can’t throw anything away. Anything. I’m going to end up like one of those old weirdos who lives in a network of tunnels burrowed through trash – yet I do not fear this. Will Self Read Quote
I loathe computers more and more, so I have one I can shut down and shelve like a book. Will Self Read Quote
Many of my works fall into the category of ‘Zeitgeist novels’. Yet I hope that they aren’t only reportage, but also attempts to convey the sense of the present to the future. Will Self Read Quote
What fiction offers us is an intimacy shorn of the messy contingencies of human existence – gender, race, class or age. Those moments of transcendence when we exclaim ‘You know exactly what I mean!’ depend for much of their force on the anonymous character of the intimacy between writer and reader. Will Self Read Quote
You may have gathered that I am not the most cheerful of revellers – some characterise me as the death and soullessness of any party but it wasn’t always so, believe me. Will Self Read Quote
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. Will Self Read Quote
