William Self is an English novelist, reviewer and columnist. He received his education at University College School, Christ's College Finchley, and Exeter College, Oxford. He is married to journalist Deborah Orr.Self is known for his satirical, grotesque and fantastic novels and short stories set in seemingly parallel universes.
Two sons called Alexis and Luther.
Has 2 children with present wife, a girl and a boy. The boys name is Ivan.
The point about contemporary British politics is that our voting system,no longer adequately represents the diversity of political opinion,either in the Labour Party or the Tory Party. The Labour Party needs to,split and so do the Tories.
I think this [Brexit] is a highly disruptive, wrong-headed and stupid,thing to do.
[David Cameron called this Referendum] as a tactical measure. The irony,is that the Tories have been hoisted by the petard of unforeseen,consequences.
Who says language is innate? I have to learn it anew every day. . .
If a TARDIS is outside Space and Time, then you should be able to fit a,bigger TARDIS inside a smaller TARDIS.
I think the main difficulty people have writing long form fiction is,knowing that it will never be read, which is a terrible thing.
Regarding drugs I say that a given drug experience might be interesting,but repeating that experience over and over is pretty bloody boring.
Connolly once again rose to the occasion with an apothegm: "It is,closing time in the Gardens of the West!",These MA Creative Writing Courses, I sat in with Cecilia and they went,round the room with their work and asked for feedback. So I gave my,feedback and Cecilia said "No, Will, this is the Positive Feedback,Section" and I said "Cecilia, that WAS my Positive Feedback". . .
The entire Culture for which the aspirant writers are being educated is,winking out of existence.
[2015 Election] Freud would have called this "The Narcissism of Small,Differences".
[London Olympics] . . . boondoggle. . .
[Debate] You know what I think? I think we all just saw the Head of the,Royal College of Psychiatrists do a comic turn to try and win us over.
The wholesome social encounter of buying a book has been reduced to a,click.
They are grubby little opportunists.
Drug addiction is hard to understand if you have no need to be,anesthetized.
Regard yourself as a small corporation of one. Take yourself off on team-building exercises (long walks). Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself while drinking a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under the desk. The following day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment.
A funny yet interesting read, Will Self knowa his stuff and must do a lot of deep research.
The postgrad at least knew enough to know that he would never know enough, lying under the stars which hung from the inky sky like bunches of inconceivably heavy, lustrous grapes, dusted with the yeast of eternity.
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.
For the rest, silence or good music, not much food, a lot of solitude, walks on the Heath, the time to think while others. . . well, often fall apart. Not so bad, not so bad at all. Being queer and self-sufficient is the best present at this season.
Most of us have had that experience - at around puberty - of realising that, despite whatever efforts we put into our chosen sports, we will become at best competent.
If the government announced that it was going to allocate a vast tranche of education funding purely to the pupils at the best public schools, there would be a national outcry - and yet this is precisely what the Olympics represents in terms of sports funding.
I loathe computers more and more, so I have one I can shut down and shelve like a book.
The whole aesthetics of computers very much feeds into my OCD. They fill my head with obsessionalities and my actions become very repetitive. It seems quite inimical to the dreamy state out of which fiction comes which seems so much less causally repetitive than the way one works on computers.
I like texting as much as the next kidult - and embrace it as yet more evidence, along with email, that we live now in the post-aural age, when an unsolicited phone call is, thankfully, becoming more and more understood to be an unspeakable social solecism, tantamount to an impertinent invasion of privacy.
If we bought everything on the Internet, our eyes and mouths and nostrils would probably begin to film over with a tegument - one initially tissue-thin and capable of being removed each morning, but which gradually thickened and hardened until we were imprisoned in our own tiny minds.
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.
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.
The high arts of literature and music stand in a curious relationship to one another, at once securely comfortable and deeply uneasy - rather like a long-term marriage.
The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon. .
