The Economist boasts a Q&A with Britain’s most grandiloquent author, Will Self.

One of the questions put to the Man Booker prize shortlisted novelist:

Where does the enormous vocabulary in your work come from?

Self’s answer:

Are my words so big? I’m never really comfortable with the idea that I’m this monstrous sesquipedalian. It just seems to me that everyone else’s vocabulary must be rather grotesquely attenuating.