English - Author | September 26, 1961 -
Like all right-listening folk, I am an implacable enemy of all muzak.
Will Self
I AmEnemyLikeFolkAmImplacable
To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail - the disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content, and the leaden, halting sentences on the page always seems a dreadful falling short.
ShortFeelPageSeriouslyWrite
There's a flip side to having prominent public intellectuals, which is that they start meddling in politics and often with quite disastrous results.
PoliticsStartResultsSideFlip
So heedless have we become of our own image that second-hand mobile phones now invariably come with a SIM card chock-full of discarded intimacies.
NowBecomePhonesImageOwnMobile
You don't need to know this - but here goes: due to some acquired infantilism, I feel compelled to fall asleep listening to the radio. On a good night, I'll push the frail barque of my psyche off into the waters of Lethe accompanied by the midnight newsreader - on a bad one, it's the shipping forecast.
GoodGood NightListeningNightPush
I like texting as much as the next kidult - and embrace it as yet more evidence, along with email, that we live now in the post-aural age, when an unsolicited phone call is, thankfully, becoming more and more understood to be an unspeakable social solecism, tantamount to an impertinent invasion of privacy.
LiveAgePhonePhone CallPrivacy
Most of us have had that experience - at around puberty - of realising that, despite whatever efforts we put into our chosen sports, we will become at best competent.
SportsBestExperienceWillBecome
Live life and write about life. Of the making of many books there is indeed no end, but there are more than enough books about books.
LifeLiveLive LifeEndEnoughMore
I am a regular, if not exactly enthusiastic, patron of my local bookshop. I try to buy at least some books there because I cling to the belief that it's important to maintain those businesses which put a human face on the exchange of money for goods and services.
MoneyI AmFaceImportantBelief
In survey after survey, people report that the greatest dangers they face are, in this order: terrorist attack, plane crashes and nuclear accidents. This despite the fact that these three combined have killed fewer people in the past half-century than car accidents do in any given year.
CarPastPeopleFaceYearThree
As for critical writing about modernism, its moments of lucidity are but fulgurations illuminating the dark and incomprehensible landscape of its subject's unabashed difficulty.
WritingLandscapeMomentsDarkAbout
The high arts of literature and music stand in a curious relationship to one another, at once securely comfortable and deeply uneasy - rather like a long-term marriage.
MarriageMusicRelationshipCurious
Copyright © 2024 QuotesDict Will Self quotes