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.Collection: Power
False modesty can be worse than arrogance.
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.
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.
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.
For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.
Your environment affects you wherever you are.
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.
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.
My books are anti-absolutist and deeply distrustful of any religious stance that precludes the validity of any other.
You can't be a part-time Richard Dawkins.
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.
I often lose myself in the Sudoku-like challenges of making a book work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Historically, unfortunately, race seems to be the major division that humanity has imposed on itself, a way of subdividing into smaller groups.
There's been very little writing about speech impediments, even though it's this huge psychological barrier.
I still haven't quite got used to eating live fish.
Japanese food makes me feel particularly good.
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.
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.
I've become a less brave traveller since I became a dad, but in the past I was more foolhardy than brave.
I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.
'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?
I think words operate like musical notes that the eyeball hears.
Writing is probably one-fifth coming up with the stuff, and four-fifths self-editing again and again and again.
Perhaps all human interaction is about wanting and getting.
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.
I think we think in terms of stories.
I think it's natural for youth to be drawn to newness: The world is still new for them.
I think the story is the most ancient form of human entertainment.
I can write pretty much anywhere.
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.
It's true that stammerers can become more adept at sentence construction.
Writers are so used to books being optioned and then the movie never happens.
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.
When I think about it, I'm happily bewildered that people will preorder my books They'll preorder me. What a lucky guy!
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.
I'm not from a milieu where high-register language or philosophical ideas were welcome.
I can't bear living in this huge beautiful world and not try to imitate it as best I can.
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.
I'm not a great deep political thinker.
A novelist needs to know his own strong points and weak points.
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.
Many children are natural fantasists, I think, perhaps because their imaginations have yet to be clobbered into submission by experience.
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.
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.