Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" '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
Up
Mind
Related Quotes:
" I think the story is the most ancient form of human entertainment. "
David Mitchell
Entertainment
Most
Story
" 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. "
David Mitchell
Time
You
Parents
" I can't bear living in this huge beautiful world and not try to imitate it as best I can. "
David Mitchell
World
Living
I Can
" 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. "
David Mitchell
I Can
Why
Will
" 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. "
David Mitchell
You
Own
Yourself
" Many children are natural fantasists, I think, perhaps because their imaginations have yet to be clobbered into submission by experience. "
David Mitchell
Natural
Think
Children
" I'm not a great deep political thinker. "
David Mitchell
Thinker
Political
Deep
" 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. "
David Mitchell
Think
Parents
Family
" It's true that stammerers can become more adept at sentence construction. "
David Mitchell
Become
More
True
" 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
" You can't be a part-time Richard Dawkins. "
David Mitchell
Part-Time
You
Richard
" Your environment affects you wherever you are. "
David Mitchell
Your
Environment
Wherever
" 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. "
David Mitchell
Power
Love
Human
" 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. "
David Mitchell
You
Future
Interesting
" Writing is probably one-fifth coming up with the stuff, and four-fifths self-editing again and again and again. "
David Mitchell
Up
Writing
Stuff
" My books are anti-absolutist and deeply distrustful of any religious stance that precludes the validity of any other. "
David Mitchell
Deeply
Stance
Religious
" I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels. "
David Mitchell
Concentrate
Make
Livelihood
" 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. "
David Mitchell
Win
Calm
Car
" I'm not from a milieu where high-register language or philosophical ideas were welcome. "
David Mitchell
Welcome
Ideas
Language
" 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
Me
" Perhaps all human interaction is about wanting and getting. "
David Mitchell
Getting
Wanting
Interaction
" 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. "
David Mitchell
Life
Childhood
Day
" 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. "
David Mitchell
Every Day
Matter
Three
" I think it's natural for youth to be drawn to newness: The world is still new for them. "
David Mitchell
New
Natural
Think
" 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. "
David Mitchell
Balloon
Character
Down
" 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. "
David Mitchell
Good
Age
Young
" 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
" 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. "
David Mitchell
Ambiguity
Been
Film
" False modesty can be worse than arrogance. "
David Mitchell
Modesty
Arrogance
False
" 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. "
David Mitchell
Believe
Only
I Believe