Zack Busner is a lot realer than me: Will Self

You don't have an English degree, something that your critics pointed out while reviewing your earlier work. Still, your work supersedes those who have one. In that sense, how important is school in order to become a writer? And if not formal education, where should one's learning come from?
Well, I certainly think you need to be educated to a level sufficient to become capable of educating yourself. I studied politics and philosophy at university, and that was – I think – an excellent choice, because the serious novel is necessarily philosophic. I quite consciously didn't study English literature, because I think such a course enhances the wrong kind of criticality and reins in the wilder flights of the imagination; also, when I was about to go to university, the French deconstructionists were dominating literary studies, and their ideas are, for the most part, nonsense – something I could tell aged 17.
All true writers are autodidacts, which is what makes the burgeoning 'creative writing' industry such a flagrant absurdity. When young writers ask me for advice I tell them this: read as much as you can and, after taking a degree in any subject other than literature, get a job that brings you into contact with people – you probably won't be able to write anything of any great significance until your 30s, so you may as well relax, and sop up the world.

While deconstruction of prose can only happen once you know the rules, without textbook education how did you learn the rules in order to challenge them?
By the time I was 20, I had a perfectly good grounding in the Western canon: I read and I read and I read, and then I read some more – I internalised the structure of so many texts that I had an intuitive grasp on form.

Did the work of certain writers impel you to become one?
Not 'certain writers' but certain texts – I'm not a fan, or a completist… with some of the writers I most admire I've only read a smattering of their work. Some of the important texts for me were Alice in Wonderland, Catch-22, The Master and Margarita, The Idiot, Metamorphosis, Journey to the End of the Night and Crash. Why? Because each of them, in their different ways, showed me the imaginative possibilities of fiction – how entire worlds could be created. You may note that there's only one 'naturalistic' text in the selection – I was never that taken by the traditional novel.

Many of your stories are based on social and medical sciences – illness, drugs, psychiatry. Why is that?
I've been ill a lot of my life, both physically and mentally, so I've been in contact with a lot of doctors and psy-professionals. I've always been interested in mental disturbance, and was strongly affected by reading the work of the so-called 'anti-psychiatrists' (R.D. Laing, Thomas Szasz, Michel Foucault et al) when I was a young man. Dostoevsky said you could tell everything about the condition of a society from the state of its prisons, but I think you can tell infinitely more from the state of its mental hospitals.

What are the similarities between your recurring character Zack Busner and you?
We both grew up in North London; we're both of Jewish heritage (although him more than me), we're both philosophically inclined, we're both highly sexual, we're both rebellious, we're both obsessed by mental illness (although him as a practitioner, me as a writer), we've both been married more than once and have numerous children, we both affect a certain dishabille, we both like Jimi Hendrix. The main difference between us is that he's 27 years older than me and a lot realer.

Your earlier work The Quantity Theory of Insanity was written in about a year's time. How has your approach towards writing changed through the years?
Well, it still takes me about a year to write a book – the books are longer and more complex, but I've grown more efficient. I still feel exactly the same about writing as I did then. It thrives in solitude – it demands solitude. It requires unswerving discipline, and it's best to write first drafts early in the morning, when your head is still full of dreams...

You say that computers get into your dreamy state of writing, so do you use the keyboard, typewriter or write on paper?
In 2004, following the inception of wireless broadband internet I stopped writing first drafts of fictional texts on computers – I realised both that the screen was now a portal to endless distraction, and worse to ceaseless literalism: the writer who works on a computer has only to Google an image of what he wants to describe and then describe that – but that's inimical to true writing, which must be the function of actually thinking in words. Since 2004, I have written all my first drafts on a manual typewriter.

From writing novels, novellas, short stories to being on television and radio, which hat do you enjoy donning the most?
I'm a writer – I like to write. All the rest is just filling in the time between books; although I do have an affection for journalism, which has got me out of my writing room and into the real world.