Will Self Quotes

I used to get criticized for putting food in novels.

The novel avoids the sublime and seeks out the interesting.

Some of the poetic writers who insert passages of realism in their texts have no underlying philosophy to uphold them, and revert to realism.

I don't think I have a very novelistic brain. I like to read, but I don't know if I could ever write a novel.

When I heard the word ''stream'' uttered with such a revolting primness, what I think of is urine and not the contemporary novel. And besides, it isn't new, it is far from the dernier cri. Shakespeare used it continually, much too much in my opinion, and there's Tristam Shandy, not to mention the "Agamemnon."

When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.

I've often thought I would like to try to write a conventional novel, but I just don't know enough about the real world to write one.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

I used to enjoy using dots where they would be least expected, not at the end of a sentence but in the middle, creating the effect... of a skipped beat. It seemed to me the mind reacted - first!... in dots, dashes, and exclamation points, then rationalized, drew up a brief, with periods.

I'd have liked to have been another Faulkner, of course.

I come at it from a different angle of attack with each novel, searching for the technological texture the story demands. There isn't a recipe; it's more of an instinct.

Novels can be a snapshot of a moment in time, or several moments in time, and as a reader, that's what I really like, and as a writer, it's what I'm drawn to also.

I'm not working on the Great American Novel. All I am doing, I hope, is entertaining readers.

Fiction writers tend to err either making people more than they are or less than they are. I'd rather err on the side of the former.

Novelists are too often assumed to write veiled autobiography.

I find that nonfiction writers are the likeliest to turn out interesting novels.

I think playing the glamour card is a disastrous error as a literary writer.

I think sometimes writers can get themselves into trouble trying to exert a totally controlled and super-knowing tone. This kind of knowingness is not the most promising tone to be sustained throughout a novel, to have a young woman who understands everybody and is always reading a room perfectly.

As much as I really like the screenwriting thing, the novel is where the author has so much control.

In my mind, there's not a great difference between what people call fiction and non-fiction. So in that sense, I'm like an early-18th-century person. I actually believe there's one way of writing.

With novels, you're representing things. You're not explaining.

I want to write books.

I'm influenced by Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace: writers who are often not content to just stack paragraphs and have to break out of that.

I'm becoming more of a novelist as I get older. The novel just seems the truer form. There's less artifice involved.

I can tell you that when Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, our writer, when she would work on some of these grander novels like, say, a book like 'The Golden Bowl', that would take her months and I wouldn't know what she was doing, really.