Words matter. These are the best David Mitchell Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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 had a happy childhood.
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.
For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.
Your environment affects you wherever you are.
I think it’s natural for youth to be drawn to newness: The world is still new for them.
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.
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.
Perhaps all human interaction is about wanting and getting.
Japanese food makes me feel particularly good.
When I think about it, I’m happily bewildered that people will preorder my books They’ll preorder me. What a lucky guy!
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.
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 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.
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.
I can write pretty much anywhere.
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.
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.
My books are anti-absolutist and deeply distrustful of any religious stance that precludes the validity of any other.
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.
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.
Historically, unfortunately, race seems to be the major division that humanity has imposed on itself, a way of subdividing into smaller groups.
I’ve become a less brave traveller since I became a dad, but in the past I was more foolhardy than brave.
I think the story is the most ancient form of human entertainment.
