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" 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. "

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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. "

David Mitchell

Art

Personality

Better

" 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 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

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

David Mitchell

Writing

Stuff

" 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

" I had a happy childhood. "

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

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

" I think all writers of my age who are brought up on films probably by the age of 16 have seen many more films than they have read classics of literature. We can't help but be influenced by film. Film has got some great tricks that it's taught writers. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Mitchell

Become

True

" 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. "

" Your environment affects you wherever you are. "

" 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. "

" 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

" False modesty can be worse than arrogance. "

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

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

" I can write pretty much anywhere. "

" I think we think in terms of stories. "

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

" 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

" 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. "