Will Self Quotes

When it comes to writers, I'm a huge fan of Ian McEwan. I've never taken a writing course, but reading and deconstructing his novels has been as good a lesson as any.

When I tell people there are three stories in 'Thunderstruck' that were from the same wrecked novel, they want to guess what they are. Nobody has. There are no characters or timelines in common. They're structured very differently. A good novel wouldn't have pulled apart so easily.

I am not Shakespeare or Hemingway, but I have written stories on tennis that were brilliant.

The language fictional characters use is chosen for effect, at least if the author is concentrating.

Obviously, I like to write stories that are page-turners. But I always try my very, very hardest to be as factually true as possible.

Our task as fiction writers isn't just to report something that didn't really happen. We have to give what we write a sense of reality. The tool of our tradition is language.

I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

Stephen King has inspired me with his humor and honesty, and his admonition that the author's job is to tell the truth.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

I'm not very good at creating worlds. I prefer to write about the world as it is.

Anthony Powell taught me to write; he has such brilliant control of the mechanics of the novel.

While writing a novel, I don't read anything new in fiction. I am too engrossed.

Each author has his or her own voice. I read each book slowly so I can see the patterns they use to spread out the garden of earthly delights.

I'll take any story if it's good.

Usually, people write the characters into a box, and that's just not true to life.

I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them.

I am a very linear thinker, so I write beginning to end. I write hundreds of pages per book that never make it into print.

Novelists should be like scientists, dissecting the cadaver.

I consider what I write to be literature. I choose the words carefully.

I'm a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence.

I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!

Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft - not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.

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

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

I've never been a true fan of the short story and have only published a single example of my own.