David Mitchell Quotes
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I'm not from a milieu where high-register language or philosophical ideas were welcome.
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I still haven't quite got used to eating live fish.
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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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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.
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I often lose myself in the Sudoku-like challenges of making a book work.
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For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.
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I can write pretty much anywhere.
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You can't be a part-time Richard Dawkins.
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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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The words 'maybe' and 'perhaps' are literally the same - the flavor is the same, the educational level is the same. But you just know when to use maybe and when to use perhaps. I think it's because of this: You get to know the tastes or musical tastes of words themselves, and this informs your choice, whether you use them or not.
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Writers are so used to books being optioned and then the movie never happens.
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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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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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I think words operate like musical notes that the eyeball hears.
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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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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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Japanese food makes me feel particularly good.
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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 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.
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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 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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I think we think in terms of stories.