Will Self Quotes
If you want to be proud of yourself, then do things in which you can take pride
A clear vision, backed by definite plans, gives you a tremendous feeling of confidence and personal power.
To find a mountain path all by oneself gives a greater feeling of strength than to take a path that is shown.
I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching.
Anyone can get a job, but do you have a purpose?
If you are in a bad relationship with anyone else, it is because you are in a bad relationship with yourself.
Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.
The summer demands and takes away too much. /But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes
The greater a child’s terror, and the earlier it is experienced, the harder it becomes to develop a strong and healthy sense of self.
...the essence of gospel-humility is not thinking more of myself or thinking less of myself, it is thinking of myself less.
A creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.
I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form.
Fear and pain should be treated as signals not to close our eyes but to open them wider.
Most every day — if not every day — for the rest of your life, you will be reminded or think of this night. And I want to thank you in advance right now for the great memories it’s going to be.
The is a secret for greater self-control, the science points to one thing: the power of paying attention.
You are magnificent beyond measure, perfect in your imperfections, and wonderfully made.
I have a healthy appetite for solitude. If you don't, you have no business being a writer.
Some people have human muses - mine is a city. I feel a startling ambivalence towards London, but for better or worse my work has come utterly to depend upon it.
The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement - if you can't deal with this, you needn't apply.
The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.
I think I now understand why it is that the young are so very nostalgic. They have so little by way of personal history that they polish it up and make it shine like a treasured heirloom.
The cynics are correct the sense of freewill is only that feeling which we have when we take the necessitated option that most appeals to us.
Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.
The key to seeing the world's soul, and in the process wakening our own, is to get over the confusion by which we think that fact is real and imagination is illusion.
I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.
Detachment produces a peculiar state of mind. Maybe that's the worst sentence of all, to be deprived of feeling what a human being ought to be entitled to feel.
I am still bullied occasionally. However, none of my current bullies really exist. They’re all in my head. Be your own best friend instead of your worst enemy.
Discipline is what you must have to resist the lure of excuses
As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds a disease of the intellect.
Sometimes I think there are only two instructions we need to follow to develop and deepen our spiritual life: slow down and let go.
The Sacred Bombshell knows that her creative feminine energy is a catalyst. She remembers her womb wisdom.
Being uneducated is no guarantee against being obnoxious.
If you believe something, you can have a morality that means something as well. You can feel recognized as an individual within the universe; it can give meaning to who you are.
Whenever I produce my best work, it's always because I've spent time being idle. Something always emerges after nothing.
though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.
Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
The conscious experience of being a subject arises when a single organism learns to enslave itself.