Will Self : (9)

" 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. " - Will Self

" 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

" Sometimes it occurs to me that the job of a serious cultural critic mostly consists in telling the generality of people that their opinions – on films, on books, on all manner of widgets, gadgets and even the latest electronic fidgets – simply aren’t up to scratch. " - Will Self

" 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. " - Will Self

" Continuous present is all we have, and stream of consciousness – which in a novel is arguably just as artificial as the stilted dialogue that you get in most conventional novels. They’re all stratagems to try to get closer to the texture of lived life. " - Will Self

" I write as someone who has no more time for repressive Islam than he does for repressive Christianity or Judaism, but at least look at the face in the hijab – and try to imagine the one beneath the niqab – before you depersonalise its wearer. " - Will Self

" 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. " - Will Self

" 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. " - Will Self

" There’s a flip side to having prominent public intellectuals, which is that they start meddling in politics and often with quite disastrous results. " - Will Self