You ask the questions: Will Self

(Such as: Will Self, is it true you used to keep a file of baroque words for future use? And: what's your idea of fun these days?)

Will Self was born in 1961 and grew up in Hampstead Garden Suburb. After reading philosophy at Oxford he worked for the Greater London Council before pursuing a career as a cartoonist for the New Statesman and other publications. In 1991 he published a highly acclaimed collection of short stories, The Quantity Theory of Insanity. Self's other books include the twin novellas Cock and Bull; a novel, My Idea of Fun; Grey Area, a second collection of short stories; The Sweet Smell of Psychosis, set in London's clubland; and Great Apes, about a man who wakes up one morning to find that everyone in the world has turned into chimpanzees.

In addition to his fiction, Self has written on a variety subjects from King's Cross crack dens to Aboriginal land rights, for a variety of publications. He lives in London with his wife, Deborah Orr, and their young child. He has two children from his first marriage.

Nick Hornby recently said that a middlebrow football 11 would "wipe the floor" with any highbrow 11. Who would feature in your "esoteric 11"? (Feel free to pick yourself for the team.)

Marcus Leroux, by e-mail

Given that the more erudite and intelligent the thinker and writer, the longer his or her work tends to survive, I have no hesitation in picking a team of all-star, all-time players. Posterity does not deal kindly with the middlebrow. Of course, this is with the proviso that you realise I know absolutely nothing about football, and I've never eaten, drunk or lived it, although I did once accidentally smoke some and found it distinctly acrid.

Goalie, Albert Camus; right-back, Friedrich Nietzsche; left-back, ST Coleridge; centre-back, L-F Céline; left-half, Walter Benjamin; centre-half, Marcel Proust; right-half, Michel de Montaigne; left-wing, William S Burroughs; centre-forward (and captain), James Joyce; right-wing, Luis Borges. Training assistant and shower rubdown operative, WW Self.

Does the idea of your work being studied horrify you, or does it massage your ego?

Marcus Leroux, by e-mail

Having come to some kind of literary maturity during the controversy surrounding Colin McCabe and the rejection/absorption of French theories of literary deconstruction by British academia, I've always relished the idea of my work being not simply misunderstood by ordinary readers, but also comprehensively misinterpreted by the professionals. However, this isn't an egotistic relish; once a book has been completed it's like a child that's left home, whether it ends up smoking crack in a King's Cross whorehouse or being punted up the Cam by an effete ephebe is its own affair.

Why the long face?

Peter Ross, by e-mail

I have a long head.

I listen with fear and trepidation to the Saturday Essay on Radio 4's Today programme wondering, will it be you or Freddie Forsyth? Do you listen to your alter ego and, if so, with what consequences?

Sally Armitage

No, I hardly ever listen to Freddie's essay, I hear enough right-wing, reactionary twaddle riding in the back of taxis.

So what is your idea of fun these days?

Carl Hirst, Stroud

Working, walking, swimming, being with friends, playing with my children, having sexual congress with the decapitated corpses of tramps.

Which dictionary do you work with? And is it true that you used to keep a file of baroque words and inkhorn terms for future use?

S Colboy, Macclesfield

I use the Shorter Oxford and Jonathon Green's Dictionary of Slang. No, it isn't true about the file of baroque words. I am a bit of a sesquipedalian, but the only means by which I augment my word lode is to note the definitions either side of the one I'm looking for. I wouldn't know what to do with an inkhorn, unless it came attached to a blotting-paper unicorn.

William Blake says in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." Discuss.

Bran Keighley, Little Chalfont

Thomas De Quincey says: "If a man who tends oxen should take opium, he will dream of oxen." Wittgenstein said (apropos of Bertrand Russell's philandering): "If a man tells me he has been to the worst of places I have no right to judge him, but if he tells me it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there, then I know he is a fool." Lou Reed yodelled: "Does anybody need another rock'n'roll singer whose nose, he says, has led him straight to God?" I'm with De Quincey, Wittgenstein and Reed on this one. While a life of excess may provide you with some experiences that it requires wisdom to interpret, the getting of wisdom itself is quite another affair.

Can you give us five examples of perfidy for the 21st century that mankind hasn't thought of yet?

Julia Loader, Haywards Heath

I don't know about "thinking" per se, an awful lot of things have been at least conceived of, but I don't think these five have been done quite yet: having sexual intercourse with your own, underage, clone; enslaving super-intelligent cockroaches; bifurcating the feet of infants to turn them into two, huge, prehensile toes; open-cast mining for verbiage; and opening a themed genocide restaurant.

What are your memories of Christ's College, Finchley?

Arif Ellam, Finchley

Fairly hazy. I wasn't a school-type person really. It was an amiable enough environment for me: I put on plays, I had a couple of good English teachers, Mike Smith and Colin Dudley. I made at least one lifelong friend. I went to the chip shop during break time and had a wally and chips.

What became of all your cartoons? Will there be a Collected Graphic Works of Will Self one day?

Hayley Woolfe, London

Some cartoons are reprinted in my first collection of journalism, Junk Mail, some others appear in my collection of architectural pieces, Sore Sites. I have a few copies of the collection of my New Statesman strips "Slump", published in book form in the mid-Eighties. I was never that good a cartoonist, it took me about five years to learn to draw with any kind of perspective. They should reissue The Penguin John Glashan rather than my doodles.

Is it possible, do you think, to write a Great English Novel, in the way that American authors think it's possible to write a Great American Novel? Any recent examples?

Maximillian Swales, London

I do think the notion of "great" national novels belongs in some way to ascendant and imperial cultures, hence the swagger and confidence of the post-war, 20th-century American novel. However, the judgement of posterity is warped and fickle. I personally think there have been great English novels in the last 50 years ­ and some great Scottish ones as well. One of each that spring to mind are Alasdair Gray's Lanark and JG Ballard's Crash.

A few words for Julie Burchill, please Will...

P Cox, by e-mail

I remain a great fan of Julie. There's no one whose extempore journalism is more likely to strike sparks off the dull knife of my own intellect. I think she's a remarkably smart woman, who has put great time, energy and ingenuity into uncultivating herself. One of the great English eccentrics.

It has been cogently (and non-pejoratively) argued that Charlie Parker sounded like he did because of his intake of heroin ­ do you sound like you do because of your drug intake?

Myra Daly, London

Some of my earlier work adumbrates the experience of extreme states of mind brought on by narcosis, but all of it was written when I was straight. I have now been drug and alcohol free for pushing two years, and I feel no urge to stop playing the plastic piano.

That single you made with DJ and songwriter Tim Simenon in the mid-Nineties. Any chance of a follow-up? If so, who would you team up with this time?

P Riggs, London

There are long laid but as yet unconsummated plans to turn my short story The Rock of Crack as Big as the Ritz into a dub reggae opera with my friend the DJ and musician Charlie Wood aka "The Herb". He did the music for the South Bank Show documentary on my work in 1998. I'd love to do something with Massive Attack, who I know slightly ­ but then wouldn't we all?

If psychosis has a sweet smell, what smells bad?

B Shindler, Brighton

State-enforced sanity.

If you woke one morning to find that you had lost your literary powers, what other profession would you turn to?

Carla Hayder, by e-mail

Plumbing. And when I visited foreign cities, I would carry letters of introduction to foreign plumbers with me, and hope that they would invite me to plumbing soirées.

You seem to have a bit of a fetish about dead people who aren't really dead. It was the subject of your first short story and your last novel. Did somebody close to you die when you were at an impressionable age?

John Morgan, London

My mother died of cancer when I was 27 years old, and my father died of cancer in 1999. I think you're always at an impressionable age when your parents die.

The novel 'How the Dead Live' is published in paperback by Penguin tomorrow, £6.99