Will Self Quotes

In France, I discovered that I love writing in the city. There's such an intensity to being in the city that matches the intensity of what you're experiencing in your head.

London perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play and a story and a poem, without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets... To walk alone through London is the greatest rest.

London is full of creative people - you can never say that it's not.

London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character - a living being - within each of my books.

Most inspiration still comes from bicycling around San Francisco. This city never fails to inspire me. It is one of the most vibrant cities - especially visually - with a constant influx of young energy arriving daily. I love it.

Everyone's looking to the urban scene for inspiration now.

It's that anonymous person who meanders through the streets and feels what's happening there, feels the pulse of the people, who's able to create.

I can't get enough of London! I love all the picnic benches, the old-school phone booths and parks in the middle of the city.

I always found very strong images for my songwriting in New York.

The metropolis reveals itself as one of those great historical formations in which opposing streams which enclose life unfold, as well as join one another with equal right.

Everything feels better in London. And if my life feels better, then it's easier to make music.

L.A. gives me a lot. L.A. is a city of extremes. People come here from all over the world that have these, like, giant ideas, and they put everything into it. And some people just fall flat on their face, and some people, you know, shoot like a rocket.

There are some cities that you go to that bring something out of you. Toronto is one of them.

Every city I record in gives me certain energy.

It is in the midst of the city that one writes the most inspiring pages about the country.

It is hard not to be inspired when you're living in New York. It doesn't matter what you do. I think that there is so much going on in this city. I like walking around or taking the subway, thinking about all the history here, looking at the architecture and all the people; of course, the museums. It's tough to find a better place to live.

A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination.

In a few hours one could cover that incalculable distance; from the winter country and homely neighbours, to the city where the air trembled like a tuning-fork with unimaginable possibilities.

In a pure anonymous encounter you find a world alive and full of character. In New York, the street adventures are incredible. There are a thousand stories in a single block. You see the stories in people's faces. You hear the songs immediately. Here, in Los Angeles, there are fewer characters because they are all inside automobiles.

I loved New York — every inch of it. It was a little bit scary at that time, but still, the excitement was so strong — visually and intellectually. It was like a monster.

When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Because this is so, there is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities: a city cannot be a work of art.

New York is hard, cynical, ruthless, even beyond other cities. From their early repression its children emerge sophisticated, both stunted and overdeveloped, perverted, premature, forced by the artificiality of their environment.

I am ambivalent about London because I am so ambivalent about England in general.

I love and hate this place because it is full of words.

[On Orson Welles:] When I talk to him, I feel like a plant that's been watered.