David Mitchell's Quotes

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.

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.

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.

False modesty can be worse than arrogance.

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.

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

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

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

I can write pretty much anywhere.

I can't bear living in this huge beautiful world and not try to imitate it as best I can.

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

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

I rarely ever put my head above the rampart and see where this big lumbering behemoth called 'global literature' is going.

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

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 think we think in terms of stories.

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

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

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 a great deep political thinker.

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

I've become a less brave traveller since I became a dad, but in the past I was more foolhardy than brave.

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

Japanese food makes me feel particularly good.

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

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

Married or unmarried, young or old, poet or worker, you are still a dreamer, and will one time know, and feel, that your life is but a dream.

I thank Heaven every summer's day of my life, that my lot was humbly cast within the hearing of romping brooks, and beneath the shadow of oaks.

I love better to count time from spring to spring; it seems to me far more cheerful to reckon the year by blossoms than by blight.

The way of a man's heart will be foreshadowed by what goodness lies in him - coming from above, and from around; but a way foreshadowed is not a way made.

Youth is in a grand flush, like the hot days of ending summer; and pleasant dreams thrall your spirit, like the smoky atmosphere that bathes the landscape of an August day.

But wealth is a great means of refinement; and it is a security for gentleness, since it removes disturbing anxieties.

In the vanity of self-consciousness one feels at a long remove above the ordinary love and trustfulness of a simple and pure heart.

No man's brain is so dull, and no man's eye so blind, that they cannot catch food for dreams.

The future is wider than vision, and has no end.

There is no genius in life like the genius of energy and industry.

You grow up however, unfortunately, as the college years fly by, into a very exaggerated sense of your own capacities.

Determine to become one of the best. Sufficient money will almost automatically follow if you get to be one of the 'best' in your chosen field, whatever it is.

I care not how worldly you may be: there are times when all distinctions seem like dust, and when at the graves of the great you dream of a coming country, where your proudest hopes shall be dimmed forever.

The sparrow that is twittering on the edge of my balcony is calling up to me this moment a world of memories that reach over half my lifetime, and a world of hope that stretches farther than any flight of sparrows.