David Mitchell Quotes

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David Mitchell

Profession : Novelist

Birth : January 12, 1969

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

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

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

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

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

I think we think in terms of stories.

David Mitchell

Japanese food makes me feel particularly good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Mitchell

Your environment affects you wherever you are.

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

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

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

David Mitchell