David Mitchell Quotes
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It's true that stammerers can become more adept at sentence construction.
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I often lose myself in the Sudoku-like challenges of making a book work.
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You can't be a part-time Richard Dawkins.
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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'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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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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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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I can write pretty much anywhere.
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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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Japanese food makes me feel particularly good.
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I think words operate like musical notes that the eyeball hears.
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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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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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'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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Many children are natural fantasists, I think, perhaps because their imaginations have yet to be clobbered into submission by experience.
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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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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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False modesty can be worse than arrogance.
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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.