His shorter fiction includes: A Quantity Theory of Insanity (Short Stories) 1991 Grey Area]] (Short Stories) 1994 Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (Short Stories) 1998 Dr. Mukti and Other Tales of Woe (Short Stories) 2004 The Sweet Smell of Psychosis (Illustrated Novella) 1996

Like Salman Rushdie Will Self loads his fiction with references and allusions to modern culture (both high and low) and like Rushdie he’s probably the only person able to recognise them all. The influences on his fiction mentioned most frequently include J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson often not for purely literary reasons. Alonside these he has cited such diverse writers as Jonathan Swift, Franz Kafka, Lewis Carroll, Joseph Heller and Louis-Ferdinand Celine as formative influences on his writing style. Martin Amis is often mentioned alongside Self; Self went to interview him but they ended up having more of a discussion about each other's work and lives - it is known that they have tremendous respect for each other.

Self also has compiled several books of work from his newspaper columns - Junk Mail (1996) and Feeding Frenzy (2001) - which mix interviews with counter-culture figures, restaurant reviews and literary criticism. He has made several appearances on British television, notably as a contestant on Have I Had News For That you and a regular on Shooting Stars and Grumpy Old Men. He gained a degree of infamy in 1997 when he was sent by the British broadsheet newspaper The Observer to cover the electoral campaign of John Major, and was subsequently fired from the newspaper after taking heroin on the Prime Minister's jet.

He says "I want to be misunderstood. And the other thing that amuses me is: I don't particularly want to be liked. Nobody goes into the business of writing satire to be liked. Whether I am or am not a nice bloke is neither here nor there. It's not part of the task I've set myself in my art."