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" 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

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" Your environment affects you wherever you are. "

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

David Mitchell

Notes

I Think

" I think we think in terms of stories. "

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

David Mitchell

Become

True

" 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. "

" 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

" False modesty can be worse than arrogance. "

" 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'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 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. "

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

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

David Mitchell

Writing

Stuff

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

" Perhaps all human interaction is about wanting and getting. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" You can't be a part-time Richard Dawkins. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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

" 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. "