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
False modesty can be worse than arrogance.
Many children are natural fantasists, I think, perhaps because their imaginations have yet to be clobbered into submission by experience.
I often lose myself in the Sudoku-like challenges of making a book work.
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.
I rarely ever put my head above the rampart and see where this big lumbering behemoth called 'global literature' is going.
Japanese food makes me feel particularly good.
I think we think in terms of stories.
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.
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.
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.
I love HBO productions, actually, like 'The Wire.'
I think the story is the most ancient form of human entertainment.
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.
When I think about it, I'm happily bewildered that people will preorder my books They'll preorder me. What a lucky guy!
Your environment affects you wherever you are.
For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.
'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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's true that stammerers can become more adept at sentence construction.
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.
Writing is probably one-fifth coming up with the stuff, and four-fifths self-editing again and again and again.
Perhaps all human interaction is about wanting and getting.
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.
A novelist needs to know his own strong points and weak points.
I've become a less brave traveller since I became a dad, but in the past I was more foolhardy than brave.
My books are anti-absolutist and deeply distrustful of any religious stance that precludes the validity of any other.
You can't be a part-time Richard Dawkins.
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.
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.
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.
I still haven't quite got used to eating live fish.
I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.
I think words operate like musical notes that the eyeball hears.
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.
I think it's natural for youth to be drawn to newness: The world is still new for them.
I can write pretty much anywhere.
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.
Writers are so used to books being optioned and then the movie never happens.
The words 'maybe' and 'perhaps' are literally the same - the flavor is the same, the educational level is the same. But you just know when to use maybe and when to use perhaps. I think it's because of this: You get to know the tastes or musical tastes of words themselves, and this informs your choice, whether you use them or not.
I'm not from a milieu where high-register language or philosophical ideas were welcome.
I can't bear living in this huge beautiful world and not try to imitate it as best I can.
I'm not a great deep political thinker.
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.
