David Mitchell Quotations

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

'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?

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

Writing is probably one-fifth coming up with the stuff, and four-fifths self-editing again and again and again.

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

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.

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

With the lack of available land in the TMC, the property is an excellent addition to SMC's growing Houston portfolio.

Science devises ever bloodier means of war until humanity's powers of destruction overcome our powers of creation and our civilisation drives itself to extinction.

Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president's pen or a vainglorious general's sword.

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.

The world never stops unmaking what the world never stops making. But who says the world has to make sense?

Dreams are shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter. Dreams are beaches where the yet-to-be, the once-were, the will-never-be may walk awhile with the still are.

Folks with most to complain about seldom complain most.

Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud's blowed from or who the soul'll be 'morrow? Only Sonmi the east an' the west an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o' clouds.

I remain thankful to God for all his mercies.

The healthy can't understand the emptied, the broken.

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

Times are you say a person's b'liefs ain't true, they think you're sayin' their lifes ain't true an' their truth ain't true.

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

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.

What do I miss? Second-hand bookshops where I can find things I had no idea I wanted. AbeBooks helps, but it doesn't have that smell.

Oh, diplomacy ... it mops up war's spillages; legitimizes its outcomes; gives the strong state the means to impose its will on a weaker one, while saving its fleets and battalions for weightier opponents.

Dreams are all I have ever truly owned.

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

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

The mind abhors a vacancy & is wont to people it with phantoms.

I elbowed my way into the grubby café, bought a pie that tasted of shoe polish and a pot of tea with cork crumbs floating in it, and eavesdropped on a pair of Shetland pony breeders. Despondency makes one hanker after lives one never led. Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or they don't, will is pitted against will. "Admire me, for I am a metaphor.

Nothing is as eloquent as nothing.

It's a small world. It keeps recrossing itself.

The uncreated and the dead exist solely in our actual and virtual pasts.

Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one's core. Rome'll decline and fall again, Cortés'll lay Tenochtitlán to waste again, and later, Ewing will sail again, Adrian'll be blown to pieces again, you and I'll sleep under the Corsican stars again, I'll come to Bruges again, fall in and out of love with Eva again, you'll read this letter again, the sun'll grow cold again. Nietzsche's gramophone record. When it ends, the Old One plays it again, for an eternity of eternities.

As many truths as men. Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent.

The mind has a mind of its own. It shows us pictures. Pictures of the past and the might-one-day-be. This mind's mind exerts its own will, too, and has its own voice.

So little is actually worthy of belief or disbelief. Better to strive to coexist than seek to disapprove . . .

The song instantly insisted it'd never existed.

Why ask a question whose answer would demand ten more questions?

The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak.

Do," said Louisa finally, "whatever you can't not do.

clocks in disagreement are worse than no clock at all.

Assured her I’ve never loved anyone except myself and have no intention of starting now,

Wars are never cured, they just go into remission for a few years.

Pain is strong, aye - but friends' eyes, more strong." I told him that he knows next to nothing about me & I know nothing about him. He jabbed at his eyes & jabbed at mine, as if that single gesture were ample explanation.

A weapon men use against women is the refusal to take them seriously.

Leaves turned to soil beneath my feet. Thus it is, trees eat themselves.

War's an auction where whoever can pay the most in damage and still be standing wins.

If swans weren't real, myths'd make them up.

Human beings need to watch out for reasonless niceness too. It's never reasonless and its reason's not usually nice.

This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself.

maybe the meaning of life lies in looking for it

The human world is made of stories, not people. The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed

Act', implores the Ghost of Future Regret. 'I shan't give you another chance'. [and so Jacob does] 'Damned fool,' groans the Demon of Present Regret. 'What have you done?

Women, O, women! They'll find the baddest meanin' in your words & hold it up.

The her that lived in her looked out through her eyes, through my eyes, and at the me that lives in me.

Mother used to say escape is never further than the nearest book. Well, Mumsy, no, not really. Your beloved large-print sagas of rags, riches, and heartbreak were no camouflage against the miseries trained on you by the tennis ball launcher of life, were they? But, yes, Mum, there again, you have a point. Books don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.

If, by happiness, you mean the absence of adversity I and all fabricants are the happiest stratum in corpocracy as genomicists insist. However, if happiness means the conquest of adversity or a sense of purpose, or the xercise of one’s will to power, then of all Nea So Copros’s slaves we surely are the most miserable.

Do ants get headaches?

How could I know a famished heart will eat its mind? Can kill its body?

Have you noticed," said John, "how countries call theirs 'sovereign nuclear deterrents,' but call the other countries' ones 'weapons of mass destruction'?

Always, it is the poor people who pay. And always, it is the poor people's women who pay the most.

As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory.

Anticipating the end of the world is humanity's oldest passtime

To enslave an individual troubles your consciences, Archivist, but to enslave a clone is no more troubling than owning the latest six-wheeler ford, ethically. Because you cannot discern our differences, you assume we have none. But make no mistake: even same-stem fabricants cultured in the same wombtank are as singular as snowflakes.

I wonder how many years Suga has been carrying his curse around with him. I forget that other people in the world have broken parts too.

People b'lief the world is built so an' tellin'em it ain't so caves the roof on their heads 'n'maybe yours.

But you have read Madame Bovary?' (I'd never heard of her books.) 'No.

The soul is a verb." He impales a lit candle on a spike. "Not a noun.

Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my year's fragments into a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late.

I’m scared of the future. I’m scared of the past. I’m nervous at the moment.

I...asked why purebloods despised me so. He replied, 'What if the difference between social strata stem not from genomics or inherent xcellence or even dollars, but merely differences in knowledge? Would this not mean the whole Pyramid is built on shifting sands?... fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' consciences; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding up the mirror

There are so many cities in every single city.

Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction

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

Who was blowing on the nape of my neck.

Your turn has come to sift through the dreck of humanity for rare specks of originality

Gosh. The subjunctive is always the first to go.

Memories are their own descendents masquerading as the ancestors of the present.

over 85% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

These jokes the world plays, they're not funny at all.

...there ain't no journey what don't change you some.

History admits no rules; only outcomes.

Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms around the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.