Will Self Quotes

People really feed on someone else's tragedies or problems.

I'm not the type of person to have a schadenfreude.

I think people just like seeing failure.

The easiest thing to feel is sadness.

No sign of pleasure greeted the announcement. The mood in the hall was leaden. My mood was livelier. Fright is livelier than lead.

I am convinced that we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pain of others

I don't like stress because stress stresses me out.

It bewildered Ig, the idea that a person could not be interested in music. It was like not being interested in happiness.

The word resentment means to re-feel...to feel again. Someone wrongs or wounds you; in resenting it, you re-feel the injury. And you re-hurt yourself. The Hebrew Talmud says that a person who bears a grudge is "Like one who, having cut one hand while handling a knife, avenges himself by stabbing the other hand."

No one should ever be bored. … One can be horrified, or disgusted, but one can’t be bored.

I'd rather deal with anger than apathy.

I don't think jealousy has much of a connection with real, objective conditions. Like if you're fortunate you're not jealous, but if life hasn't blessed you, you are jealous. Jealousy doesn't work that way. It's more like a tumor secretly growing inside us that gets bigger and bigger, beyond all reason. Even if you find out it's there, there's nothing you can do to stop it.

Nothing makes people so worthy of compliments as receiving them. One is more delightful for being told one is delightful-just as one is more angry for being told one is angry.

Pride is seldom delicate, it will please itself with very mean advantages; and envy feels not its own happiness, but when it may be compared with the misery of others

I grant you that frustration is a very mild form of fear, yet it is fear nonetheless.

Self-pity? I see no moral objections to it, the smell drives people away, but that's a practical objection, and occasionally an advantage.

If you want to strengthen an enemy and make him exult - hate him.

Frustration is a function of our expectations.

Everything makes me angry, unless it makes me sad.

No emotion falls into dislike so readily as sorrow.

Laughter is an independent, tremendously important, and lurid emotion.

It makes me feel the way I need to feel.

Fear is the anticipation of the pain in the future. Anger is the remembrance of pain in the past. Hostility is wanting to get even.

We all like to see people sea-sick when we are not ourselves.