English - Novelist | January 12, 1969 -
False modesty can be worse than arrogance.
David Mitchell
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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.
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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.
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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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Japanese food makes me feel particularly good.
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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.
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Writing is probably one-fifth coming up with the stuff, and four-fifths self-editing again and again and again.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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My books are anti-absolutist and deeply distrustful of any religious stance that precludes the validity of any other.
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