A creative life cannot be sustained by approval any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.
A funny yet interesting read, Will Self knowa his stuff and must do a lot of deep research.
The postgrad at least knew enough to know that he would never know enough, lying under the stars which hung from the inky sky like bunches of inconceivably heavy, lustrous grapes, dusted with the yeast of eternity.
Lust was a positive high-tension cable, plugged into my core, activating a near-epileptic seizure of conviction that this was the one thing I had to do in life.
But in Ward 9 the air had a real quality, it clamped itself over your face like a pad of cotton wool, soaked through with the sweet chloroform of utter sadness. – Ward 9
This is the paradox for me: in failure alone is there any possibility of success. I don’t think I’m alone in this – nor do I think it’s an attitude that only prevails among people whose work is obviously ‘creative’.
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.
I loathe computers more and more, so I have one I can shut down and shelve like a book.
Death, the real simile for disease – for when we are ill, do we not always feel like we are dying, even if it’s only a little? – remains, despite our secularism, the most metaphoricised phenomenon of all.
You may have gathered that I am not the most cheerful of revellers – some characterise me as the death and soullessness of any party but it wasn’t always so, believe me.
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.
The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.