Will Self

"So I was smacked up on the Prime Minister's jet – big deal."

"The éminence cerise, the bolster behind the throne."

"There can be no more thrilling idea of intimacy than connecting with someone through the agency of the written word. Here we meet, on the page, naked and unadorned: shorn of class, race, gender, sexual identity, age and nationality. The reader I seek is a tautology, for he/she is simply…the person who wants to read what I have written."

"I have a healthy appetite for solitude. If you don't, you have no business being a writer."

"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."

"Wealth is a form of power in our society. With great power comes great responsibility. If you have too much wealth, ipso facto, you have too much power - therefore you have too much responsibility - and you're a kind of dictator."

"Things are only boring if you are boring."

"Campaigning at a school in Enfield in 2001, Tony Blair was caught unawares by a feisty British Asian sixth-former. Suddenly this apparition arose before him, demolishing Blair's points as speedily as he tried to make them. This time around the New Labour machine haven't wanted to risk any of that. The Emperor has been ferried from Potemkin village to Potemkin hospital, and before he arrives a rigged rent-a-crowd of "ordinary people" are brought in to wave little flags. Journalists have been "embedded" - undoubtedly the cadres were hoping that these trusties would begin to sympathise with the man upon whom their jobs depended [and] they'd cease to notice how much of what he said was utter shit."

"My ex wants to divide up the contents of the former marital home by coming round, when I’m not there, putting a red dot on absolutely anything he wants, then getting me to organise it all into a place where he can have it picked up. Anyone else had this?"

"Anyway. #MeToo."

"I have C-PTSD. I wonder why? His "compassionate writings" on mental illness make me want to throw up."

"I changed the locks long ago. He’s been litigating against me for more than two years, and I’m broke. I can’t afford a restraining order."