Will Self Quotes

Madness is no madness when shared.

Madness is rare in individuals - but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.

The crowd may be influenced easily, largely because it is a crowd.

Those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.

When a hundred men stand together, each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

A mob is not, as is so often said, mindless. A mob is single-minded.

The aggregate of everybody's emotion, it's such a powerful thing. You can see it in the Trump rallies, where people - I just know, in their living rooms, would be better people - are driven to the worst possibilities by the bloodlust in a crowd. It just gets ginned up, and they're outside of themselves.

An audience can become a mob very easily.

Popular thought appeals to crowds, gatherings and tribes, who use it as a way to guide the herd. It is very evident in protests - sometimes the very people doing the protesting have NO IDEA what they are talking about.

I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That's an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it's next door to impossible not to imagine that they're all waxworks, but probably they're thinking just the same about you.

Even the company of the mad was better than the company of the dead.

The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.

Suddenly the world has run amok and left you alone and sane behind

Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.

In solitude the lonely man is eaten up by himself, among crowds by the many.

Separation penetrates the disappearing person like a pigment and steeps him in gentle radiance.

Loneliness comes with life.

Nothing makes us more vulnerable than loneliness, except greed.

Oh, I do get lonely, yes.

I am alone; I am always alone no matter what.

When you're surrounded by all these people, it can be even lonelier than when you're by yourself. You can be in a huge crowd, but if you don't feel like you can trust anybody or talk to anybody, you feel like you're really alone.

When friendship disappears then there is a space left open to that awful loneliness of the outside world which is like the cold space between the planets. It is an air in which men perish utterly.

While people are quick to praise the wisdom of the crowd, being an old-school journalist, I look at the wisdom of the crowd and know it can quickly turn into a mob mentality.

Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.

I'm so secluded. Very alone.