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My books are anti-absolutist and deeply distrustful of any religious stance that precludes the validity of any other.
David Mitchell -
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.
David Mitchell
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As long as our civilisation keeps trundling along generally forwards, then there is the possibility of a future where ethnicity is merely an interesting badge, not a uniform you can't take off.
David Mitchell -
I'm not a great deep political thinker.
David Mitchell -
You can't be a part-time Richard Dawkins.
David Mitchell -
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.
David Mitchell -
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.
David Mitchell -
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.
David Mitchell
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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.
David Mitchell -
Japanese food makes me feel particularly good.
David Mitchell -
'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?
David Mitchell -
I think words operate like musical notes that the eyeball hears.
David Mitchell -
Writing is probably one-fifth coming up with the stuff, and four-fifths self-editing again and again and again.
David Mitchell -
False modesty can be worse than arrogance.
David Mitchell
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Perhaps all human interaction is about wanting and getting.
David Mitchell -
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.
David Mitchell -
There's been very little writing about speech impediments, even though it's this huge psychological barrier.
David Mitchell -
I've become a less brave traveller since I became a dad, but in the past I was more foolhardy than brave.
David Mitchell -
Many children are natural fantasists, I think, perhaps because their imaginations have yet to be clobbered into submission by experience.
David Mitchell -
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.
David Mitchell
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I think we think in terms of stories.
David Mitchell -
When you're out of your own cultural context you have conversations with yourself that you just don't have at any other point in your life. When you're in a hotel room on the border between India and Nepal you can really discover things about yourself.
David Mitchell -
I can't bear living in this huge beautiful world and not try to imitate it as best I can.
David Mitchell -
I rarely ever put my head above the rampart and see where this big lumbering behemoth called 'global literature' is going.
David Mitchell