Will Self Quotes

Even without wars, life is dangerous.

I'm not really afraid of the dark, except if I'm walking. The thing that scares me the most is the possibility of walking into a wall and busting my lip.

Nature is not evil. The world occasionally shrugs its shoulders, and people get knocked off. The earth, for geological reasons that are well known, is a fairly risky place to live. To be evil, you have to have intent. Any remarkable natural happening in which no human will is employed cannot be regarded as evil.

There is not one single cause of any accident.

Almost all accidents take place because of human distraction.

So often people read conspiracy into a thing when it's really a confluence of cock-ups and the wrong button being pressed at the wrong time, or the guest you wanted gets into the wrong taxi and doesn't show up.

People ask why God allows suffering. You could just as well ask the Minister of Transport why he allows accidents on Britain's roads.

The nature of tragedy and accident is that we cannot predict.

A universe capable of giving birth to many such accidents is-- blind or not-- a good world to live in, a promising universe.

One: demonstrations always crash. And two: the probability of them crashing goes up exponentially with the number of people watching.

I don't believe in fate," she said at last. "But I do believe in...loopholes. I think a lot of what keeps the world going is the result of accidents — happy or otherwise — and taking advantage of these.

Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.

I always get nervous when people start talking about legacies.

The past tempts us, the present confuses us, and the future frightens us. And our lives slip away, moment by moment, lost in that vast terrible in-between. But there is still time to seize that one last fragile moment.

Nothing so focuses the mind as the prospect of being hanged.

The basic anxiety, the anxiety of a finite being about the threat of non-being, cannot be eliminated. It belongs to existence itself.

Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?

When you stood between somebody you loved and death, it was hard to be awake and it was hard to sleep.

The sense of death is most in apprehension.

Ordinary men live in fear all the time. Didn't you know that? We're afraid of the weather, we're afraid of powerful men, we're afraid of the night and the monsters that lurk in the dark, we're afraid of growing old and of dying. Sometimes we're even afraid of living. Ordinary men are afraid almost every minute of their lives.

Death is when the monsters get you.

I'm human -- all I do is try to do my job. When I don't do it, the way it happened today, it's out of my control. He put the ball in play and it happened to find a hole. I wish I could take it back, but I can't. You move on.

The gods confound the man who first found out How to distinguish hours! Confound him, too, Who in this place set up a sun-dial, To cut and hack my days so wretchedly Into small portions.

Motherhood didn't make you stronger; it made you vulnerable and afraid of what death could steal from you.

I wouldn't call myself a coward, no way. But being buried alive is something I could never handle. The only way you'd see me being buried alive is if I was dead, man.