“I’m not anally reclusive, I’m more of an oral person” says Will Self, and he is right: he knows how to talk as well as he knows how to write. In the course of one hour, the self-described posh cockney has spouted the kind of epigrams that make Oscar Wilde sound like a bit of an amateur; when it comes to the humble anecdote, he has as many as the Neighbourhood Watch on a busy day; it makes your head spin a bit, listening to him.

“I’ve led a fairly rickety life, including a lot of removals.” he says, crossing his long jean-clad legs. He is softly spoken, gently droll. He is interesting to look at too: his face is taut, his cheek pouches drawn like purse strings. “I like the incoherence of my life” he says, like any self-respecting courter of controversy. “I like my life unedited.” Then, as if to prove it, he veers off: “Jackie shot JFK up with LSD on his deathbed, you know that, right?”

Self is not as crass as he makes himself out to be. When he talks about writing, his voice becomes more reserved, more honest. He mentions the British Library’s decision to buy up all his work for the archives: “Right up until the British Library truck arrived and took it all away I seriously thought of just torching it because there's a purity to that, isn't it?” But he admits that “the act of being archived… There are certain markers in a writer’s life that make them feel they’ve achieved posterity.”

Don’t get the feeling that Self is resting on his laurels, though - he plans to write a memoir, and finds it ironic that most writers leave it too late. He says he’s got a huge amount of files: “I got my first email address in 1995, and the vast bulk of my emails I kept. I would print them off. Very quickly I realised that that was my filing system. The filing cabinet was the email. I kept it all, a vast amount of it.” – though one wonders if he’ll be coming to the British Library to have a look at all his files every now and then, as his biography gets under way.

Self jokes that he has gotten better at sharing and looking back on his work. He sees the archive as being “part of the great enlightenment project, it's like trying to create a system of DNA for our culture” Does he ever think about his role in posterity? “I wanna be misunderstood” he says, with a sceptical smile. “Beyond a certain point, you can't be doing with being too self conscious. It's like doing a rectal exam; after a certain age, you have to say it's fine.”

- Will Self in conversation at the British Library