David Mitchell Quotes

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

I don't have problems starting writing. I have problems stopping. I'm one of the last dads to arrive at school to collect the kids, because I want to get this paragraph just right.

- David Mitchell

I think it's natural for youth to be drawn to newness: The world is still new for them.

- David Mitchell

In the 1970s and 1980s there was so little decent fiction for young people, but we're now in a golden age that shows no sign of fading. Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Lemony Snicket are only three of the best known among a good number of equals.

- David Mitchell

I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.

- David Mitchell

The art of the novelist is not unrelated to the illness of multiple personality disorder. It's a much milder form. But the better the book, the nearer to the padded cell you are.

- David Mitchell

Any adaptation is a translation, and there is such a thing as an unreadably faithful translation; and I believe a degree of reinterpretation for the new language may be not only inevitable but desirable.

- David Mitchell

You can't be a part-time Richard Dawkins.

- 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

Write something every single day, even if it's just three lines. And it doesn't matter if it's any good - just write something every day.

- David Mitchell

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

People like to say that East Asians in general, and Japanese in particular, are not very expressive: there's that term 'inscrutable.' But often, Europeans just don't get the Asian codes. Believe me, the message is being expressed OK.

- David Mitchell

There's a disease that young writers are susceptible to, which is, I will do this because I can - hubris, I suppose - without stopping to work out why.

- 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

For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.

- 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

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

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

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

Sometimes, comics will make the observation that it's not jokes that are funny, it's characters that are funny. And isn't that true! That's why I always kill jokes. I'm terrible at them, because I get the joke right, but I can't get the character right, and it just goes down like a lead balloon.

- David Mitchell

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.

- David Mitchell

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

Your environment affects you wherever you are.

- David Mitchell

When I think about it, I'm happily bewildered that people will preorder my books They'll preorder me. What a lucky guy!

- David Mitchell

I think words operate like musical notes that the eyeball hears.

- David Mitchell

I love HBO productions, actually, like 'The Wire.'

- David Mitchell

I'm certainly a plot and character man. Themes, structure, style - they're valid components of a novel and you can't complete the book without them. But I think what propels me as a reader is plot and character.

- David Mitchell

I'm not from a milieu where high-register language or philosophical ideas were welcome.

- 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

A novelist needs to know his own strong points and weak points.

- David Mitchell

I think all writers of my age who are brought up on films probably by the age of 16 have seen many more films than they have read classics of literature. We can't help but be influenced by film. Film has got some great tricks that it's taught writers.

- David Mitchell

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.

- David Mitchell

Historically, unfortunately, race seems to be the major division that humanity has imposed on itself, a way of subdividing into smaller groups.

- David Mitchell

There's been very little writing about speech impediments, even though it's this huge psychological barrier.

- David Mitchell

Many children are natural fantasists, I think, perhaps because their imaginations have yet to be clobbered into submission by experience.

- 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

I'm not a great deep political thinker.

- David Mitchell

False modesty can be worse than arrogance.

- David Mitchell

Loneliness is an integral part of travelling. I used to think it was the downside to travelling, but now I realise it is a necessary educative part of it to be embraced.

- David Mitchell

It's true that stammerers can become more adept at sentence construction.

- David Mitchell

Writers are so used to books being optioned and then the movie never happens.

- David Mitchell

My books are anti-absolutist and deeply distrustful of any religious stance that precludes the validity of any other.

- David Mitchell

I still haven't quite got used to eating live fish.

- 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

Perhaps all human interaction is about wanting and getting.

- David Mitchell

Every relationship has its own language. It takes a long time to evolve and read one another. Just as it's true for people, it's also true on a national or cultural level.

- David Mitchell

Japanese food makes me feel particularly good.

- David Mitchell

I think the story is the most ancient form of human entertainment.

- David Mitchell

I can write pretty much anywhere.

- David Mitchell

I often lose myself in the Sudoku-like challenges of making a book work.

- David Mitchell

I had a happy childhood.

- David Mitchell