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" 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

Creativity

Seeing

Think

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

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

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

David Mitchell

Past

In The Past

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" I'm not a great deep political thinker. "

" I can write pretty much anywhere. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

David Mitchell

Book

Style

" 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. "

" '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

Weakest

Mind

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

David Mitchell

Writing

Stuff

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

David Mitchell

Become

True

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

" 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 think we think in terms of stories. "

" 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. "

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

David Mitchell

Notes

I Think

" Writers are so used to books being optioned and then the movie never happens. "

" 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. "