Quotes from David Mitchell

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.

Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one's core.

As many truths as men. Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent.

Times are you say a person's b'liefs ain't true, they think you're sayin' their lifes ain't true an' their truth ain't true.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I think all writers of my age who are brought up on films probably by the age of 16 have seen many more films than they have read classics of literature. We can't help but be influenced by film. Film has got some great tricks that it's taught writers.

A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living.

War's an auction where whoever can pay the most in damage and still be standing wins.

If war's first victim is truth, its second is clerical efficiency.

War may be an auction for countries. For soldiers it's a lottery.

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

Creation never ceased on the sixth evening, it occurs to the young man. Creation unfolds around us, despite us and through us at the speed of days and nights. And we call it love.

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.

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.

Only professional diplomats, inveterate idiots and women view diplomacy as a long-term substitute for war.

Women, O, women! They'll find the baddest meanin' in your words & hold it up.

Men invented money Women invented mutual aid

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

For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.