Will Self Quotes

People have reflected on the quality of time ever since they've been writing. I suppose I have thought about and written about the question of living in the present - but it only lasts for an instant, and then everything becomes the past. The future, you know nothing about, except for some anticipations you have.

The problem with the future is that it keeps turning into the present.

One feels that the past stays the way you left it, whereas the present is in constant movement; it's unstable all around you.

I'm always thinking about time. That's one of themes I return to in my work, the way the past bears on the present, the way that time is not linear, and how that expresses itself in people's everyday lives.

My thoughts will be taken up with the future or the past, with what is to come or what has been. Of the present there is necessarily no image.

Each day has its own destiny. Yesterday is history, today is opportunity while tomorrow is mystery.

The way you remember the past depends upon your hope for the future. And if what you see in your future has no hope, it has no potential, then you view the past that brought you to here as not very good.

There's no present. There's only the immediate future and the recent past.

The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody's guess.

As I get older, the present and the past shift and become the past and the future... A lot of it is a new awareness of time and life and the wheel of fortune crushing you and lifting you and crushing you and lifting you.

Time doesn't go. Time stays. We go.

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction.

The present moment is nice but it does not last. Living in it is like waiting in a junction town for the morning limited; the junction may be interesting but some day you will have to leave it and you do not know where the limited will take you.

Human's can't live in the present as animals do; they just live in the present. But human's are always thinking about the future or the past.

We have to keep an eye on the future with a sense of the past in every passing moment of the present.

Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them; no art can keep or acquire them.

Death is the tyrant of the imagination.

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

The future is called 'perhaps', which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the important thing is not to allow that to scare you.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

If we don't have a future, then we haven't got a present.

The now, the here, through which all future plunges into the past.

The unbearableness of the future is easier to face than that of the present if only because human foresight is much more destructive than anything that the future can bring about.