David Mitchell Quotes
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A life can get knocked into a new orbit by a car crash, a lottery win or just a bleary-eyed consultant giving bad news in a calm voice.
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My books are anti-absolutist and deeply distrustful of any religious stance that precludes the validity of any other.
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I'm from a time and place where bigheadedness was a really savage crime, and you'd get cut down for it by your peers and parents.
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I'm not a great deep political thinker.
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Writers are so used to books being optioned and then the movie never happens.
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You can't be a part-time Richard Dawkins.
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Perhaps where text slides toward ambiguity, film inclines to specificity. A novel contains as many versions of itself as it has readers, whereas a film's final cut vaporizes every other way it might have been made.
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Writing is probably one-fifth coming up with the stuff, and four-fifths self-editing again and again and again.
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Japanese food makes me feel particularly good.
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If the human condition were the periodic table, maybe love would be hydrogen at No. 1. Death would be helium at No. 2. Power, I reckon, would be where oxygen is.
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Sometimes I think that creativity is a matter of seeing, or stumbling over, unobvious similarities between things - like composing a fresh metaphor, but on a more complex scale.
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I think words operate like musical notes that the eyeball hears.
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False modesty can be worse than arrogance.
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I rarely ever put my head above the rampart and see where this big lumbering behemoth called 'global literature' is going.
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When I talk about my artist parents, people imagine a bohemian environment and think, 'Aha, so that's where he gets it from!' But we were as white, straight, and middle-class as the next family on our white, straight, middle-class housing estate.
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'Y' is about the weakest letter of all. 'Y' can't make up its mind if it's a vowel or a consonant, can it?
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Perhaps all human interaction is about wanting and getting.
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I think we think in terms of stories.
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There's been very little writing about speech impediments, even though it's this huge psychological barrier.
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When I was about 14, in about 1984, I decided to become a great poet. Faber & Faber was going to publish me, and when Ted Hughes read my first anthology he would invite me to Yorkshire for meat pies and mentorship.
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The state of childhood resonates with life inside a fantasy novel. If you have no control over how you spend large chunks of your day, or are at the mercy of flawed giant beings, then the desire to bend the laws of the world by magic is strong and deep.
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Many children are natural fantasists, I think, perhaps because their imaginations have yet to be clobbered into submission by experience.
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I've become a less brave traveller since I became a dad, but in the past I was more foolhardy than brave.
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I think the story is the most ancient form of human entertainment.