- The point about contemporary British politics is that our voting system no longer adequately represents the diversity of political opinion, either in the Labour Party or the Tory Party. The Labour Party needs to split and so do the Tories.
- There's a great spreading middle-aged back end sitting on our politics and our economics at the moment.
- I called this a few weeks ago, I could see that the pollsters were not getting to Tribal Labour who nonetheless was powerfully anti-immigration and very, very uncomfortable with what they saw as "the dilution of the British national character" and it's them what won it, they came out and they couldn't be reached by the pollsters, they couldn't be called by the markets, they don't understand these people, and Dreda's right, this is the constituency that she's summoned up, but they're not the people she thinks they are, that's the problem.[Dreda Say Mitchell: What do you mean they're not the people..?] They're not the people: Oh, what's that up there in the sky! Is it a bird, is it a plane? No, it's Boris Johnson come to deliver you social justice and a more equal society!
- You should have an understanding for the people who feel their lives were shattered this morning.
- I think this [Brexit] is a highly disruptive, wrong-headed and stupid thing to do.
- [David Cameron called this Referendum] as a tactical measure. The irony is that the Tories have been hoisted by the petard of unforeseen consequences.
- When we were young it was the Balance of Payments deficit that people were worried about. The difference between the value of what we import and export. You don't hear about that any more. What you hear about now is Consumer Demand. Consumer Demand, you could have no more telling example of what our society has become, how soulless our society has become, than that it measures its moral and spiritual health on the basis of whether it is buying enough shit.
- I don't doubt people feel better on SSRIs, that's the paradox. They are working because of their belief, and what are they believing in? A kind of scientism and the reduction of themselves to chemical units. The very opposite of a soulful and embodied existence. No wonder so many prescriptions get written.
- I've spent a lot of time in Bed & Breakfasts because my parents didn't like me growing up, but didn't have the courage to put me into care...
- Who says language is innate? I have to learn it anew every day...
- If a TARDIS is outside Space and Time, then you should be able to fit a bigger TARDIS inside a smaller TARDIS.
- Some of you are too young to know this, but back in the 80s authors were Gods! We were on the front of newspapers, we had groupies! It's not like that anymore.
- This whole imbroglio is epiphenomenal!
- [News of the World Phone Hacking Scandal] The reversion to type will also occur because people want to see Celebrities brought low or people in the Public Eye, there is a great popular appetite for that, not just laughing at peoples' [It's not going to change, though] It's not going to change because it's symptomatic of a kind of weird demagogic faux egalitarianism in our Culture, the kind of Big Brother Culture, the idea that anyone can be a Star but QED anyone can be dragged down from that pedestal as well.
- I think the main difficulty people have writing long form fiction is knowing that it will never be read, which is a terrible thing.
- Regarding drugs I say that a given drug experience might be interesting but repeating that experience over and over is pretty bloody boring.
- [Cyril] Connolly once again rose to the occasion with an apothegm: "It is closing time in the Gardens of the West!"
- These MA Creative Writing Courses, I sat in with Cecilia and they went round the room with their work and asked for feedback. So I gave my feedback and Cecilia said "No, Will, this is the Positive Feedback Section" and I said "Cecilia, that WAS my Positive Feedback"...
- The entire Culture for which the aspirant writers are being educated is winking out of existence.
- [Death of Philip S Hoffman] The thing about opiate addiction is it appropriates a rightfully medical role, I don't mean to be trite about this, serious point, addiction comes about at the same time as the full professionalization of medicine and the elevation of medicine to our kind of modern priesthood, our kind of spiritual priesthood, so the idea that someone should appropriate this thing that only doctors are meant to do and do it to themselves is very shocking.
- [2015 Election] Freud would have called this "The Narcissism of Small Differences".
- [London Olympics] ...boondoggle...
- [Debate] You know what I think? I think we all just saw the Head of the Royal College of Psychiatrists do a comic turn to try and win us over.
- The wholesome social encounter of buying a book has been reduced to a click.
- [Trump] I think it's such a paradox that Nigel Farage subscribes to the Great Man of History View when he fails so miserably in measuring up to that himself. It's not the man, it's what he Symbolises.
- [Time Magazine's Man of the Year, Trump] These are not great Statesmen. They are grubby little opportunists.
- I have to say, I think the Brexiteers are living in a weird kind of: "Bring back the Birch! Bring back Bicycles! Bring back Spinsters! Bring back Two-way Family Forces Favorites!" What else are you going to bring back? Semolina?
- [Question Time, Why can't we have panels of Experts run the NHS, instead of it being a Political Football?] Oooh! You can't have Experts! They're NOT ALLOWED ANYMORE!
- The Whole Show might be about to hit the end of the Pier.
- Drug addiction is hard to understand if you have no need to be anesthetized.
- [Room 101] Sometimes I'll sit outside a coffee house and play a game of "Child or Dwarf?"
- [Krishnan Guru-Murthy: You've wanted to put a bomb under things, haven't you?] WHAT? [Politically...]
- The best book's the next one.
- [Brexit] We're a bit fucked.
- Cyril Conneley said no city should be so large you can't walk out of it in a morning.
- If you're a Bourgeois Baby Boomer in Britain, a BBB, you have lived a life Proustian in its reclusion from the kind of horrors of World History and these are the people, my peers, who are shaping these kinds of policies, people who've been featherbedded in the extreme, so I don't think the role of being a Cassandra in relation to the effect of their policies, the likelihood of their efficacy, or their intentions, is a dishonorable one at all. A lot of these decisions are being made by people who've had it unbelievably soft.
- There are collective idiocies of human nature and we would be wise to recognise them for what they are.
- People aren't really that lovable, again an aspect of the Kulturkampf is to pretend that everyone's lovable. That's a collective delusion. You know, society doesn't operate because we love everyone. Society operates through sanction, through forms of collective control, through hierarchy, through the imposition of controlled forms of mass hysteria,the novels that persuade you otherwise are pulling off a con trick, as are the moral systems.
- Do we want to live in a Country where the response to everything is to keep racking up the level of anxiety?
- You're worried about terrorism? You should be worried about one of your kids getting hit by a car, it's far more likely!
- You have what Marshall McLuhan would call "Gutenberg Minds". 40 and up, the book represents your conception of knowledge, your repository...
- The Novel is a Function of the Codex.
- You must do your correcting on a printout, because only when your Novel exists in space and time will your thinking be coherent. Paper's thin but it still exists.
- It's easy to Morris Traveller on another man's wound. As Eamon O' Malley might have said!
- We'll nude mudwrestle later to settle that point.
- Jo Rowling ushered in the Kidult era we're now living in.
- It was the Hippies that made JRR Tolkein's Lord of the Rings a big book. It wasn't. It was a Kidult phenomenon again.
- They always have such fantastical names, these pharmaceuticals, I often feel my metier was missed...
- We live in quite shitty times for Mental Illness. The Cameron Government, the Coalition, committed to something called "Parity of Esteem", the idea that people with Mental Illnesses should receive the same amount of resources in the NHS as people with physical illnesses. Well, five years on, Tory Government, and far from Parity of Esteem, beds continue to close in Secure Units and distressed, disturbed people continue to be turfed out on the street. My friends who work in Mental Health Services report terrible overcrowding, rises in assaults on Staff, and whistleblowers saying they genuinely fear for patients lives.
- You've just proved how fantastically British you are by being a massive hypocrite.
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