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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote