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" 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. "

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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

" I think we think in terms of stories. "

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

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

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

David Mitchell

Writing

Stuff

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I'm not from a milieu where high-register language or philosophical ideas were welcome. "

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

" 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

" 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'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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

David Mitchell

Become

True

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

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

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

" Your environment affects you wherever you are. "

" 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. "

" Japanese food makes me feel particularly good. "