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" 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. "

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" 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. "

David Mitchell

Writing

Problems

Right

" 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. "

" False modesty can be worse than arrogance. "

" 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

" 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. "

" Your environment affects you wherever 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

Will

People

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

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

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

David Mitchell

Writing

Stuff

" 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'm not a great deep political thinker. "

" 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'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 had a happy childhood. "

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

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

David Mitchell

Become

True

" 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. "

" 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. "

David Mitchell

First

Meat

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

David Mitchell

Wire

Love

" I think we think in terms of stories. "

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

David Mitchell

Notes

I Think