Quotes from David Mitchell

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

My books are anti-absolutist and deeply distrustful of any religious stance that precludes the validity of any other.

I often lose myself in the Sudoku-like challenges of making a book work.

Ive never had cocaine. I work in showbusiness and no one has ever offered me cocaine. Can you believe that? It makes me worry Im not always the life and soul of the party that I feel like in my head.

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 can write pretty much anywhere.

I've become a less brave traveller since I became a dad, but in the past I was more foolhardy than brave.

All revolutions are the sheerest fantasy until they happen; then they become historical inevitabilities.

True knowledge without xperience is food without sustenance

Japanese food makes me feel particularly good.

Freedom!- is the fatuous jingle of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is.

I recently bought a cat, but took it back a day later because our personalities clashed.

If I want to act relaxed, it's going to take all my cunning, skill, and concentration.

These jokes the world plays, they're not funny at all.

In the Belgian backwaters, south of Bruges, there lives a reclusive English composer, named Vyvyan Ayrs. You won't have heard of him because you're a musical oaf, but he's one of the greats.

I'm scared of the future. I'm scared of the past. I'm nervous at the moment.