David Mitchell quotes:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The organs of Venus are familiar to all, but oh, my brothers, the organ of Saturn is the bladder.

Perhaps all human interaction is about wanting and getting.

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.

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.

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.

Laughter is an anarchic blasphemy. Tyrants are wise to fear it.

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 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.

Your environment affects you wherever you are.

Probably in a parallel universe not far from here, I'm working for Nintendo.

Yay, when it came to faces, pretty lies was better'n scabbin' true"

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.

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.

Japanese food makes me feel particularly good.

Have you noticed, said John, how countries call theirs 'sovereign nuclear deterrents,' but call the other countries' ones 'weapons of mass destruction'?

Men marry women hoping they'll never change. Women marry men hoping they will.

This "Not Today" attitude of yours is a cancer. Cancer of the character. It stunts your growth.

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.

I still haven't quite got used to eating live fish.

I'm not a great deep political thinker.

Always, it is the poor people who pay. And always, it is the poor people's women who pay the most.

Two old people in a room devoid of furniture, steam rising from their teacups. They were motionless and expressionless. Waiting for something. I wish I could go into their room and sit down with them. I'd give them my Rolex for that. I wish they would smile, and pour me a cup of jasmine tea. I wish the world was like that.

Hey, metaphysics seminar is on the roof. Just take the elevator up and keep walking until you hit the sidewalk. Anything is true if enough people believe it."

I got a six'n'six so maybe my luck was healin', so I thinked, fool o' fate what I am, yay, what we all are."

The sun was deaf'nin' so high up, yay, it roared an' time streamed from it."

An' that cold hand o' wind was Old Georgie's hand, yay, the devil what was standin' there wavin' a crookit spoon."

Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud's blowed from or who the soul'll be 'morrow? Only Sonmi the east an' the west an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o' clouds."

Then the true true is diff'rent to the seemin' true? said I.Yay, an' it usually is, I mem'ry Meronym sain', an' that's why true true is presher'n'rarer'n diamonds"

I am, emphatically. Mental illness triggered by xperimental error."

To enslave an individual troubles your consciences, Archivist, but to enslave a clone is no more troubling than owning the latest six-wheeler ford, ethically. Because you cannot discern our differences, you assume we have none. But make no mistake: even same-stem fabricants cultured in the same wombtank are as singular as snowflakes.

I really wish they hadn't made the set out of asbestos.

What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.

To fool a judge, feign fascination, but to bamboozle the whole court, feign boredom.

I rarely ever put my head above the rampart and see where this big lumbering behemoth called 'global literature' is going.

Birdsong foamed in the hour-before-dawn garden.

How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards would be at one's throat all the sooner.

As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory.

I lost my balance when the train pulled away, but a human crumple zone buffered my fall. We stayed like that, half fallen. Diagonal People.

...now I'm a spent firework; but at least I've been a firework.

Don't bemoan your misspent life quite yet. Forgive me for flaunting my experience, but you have no conception of what a misspent life constitutes.

Maybe then you comprehend, speaking one language only is a prison!

Beyond the Indian hamlet, upon a forlorn strand, I happened on a trail of recent footprints.

I...asked why purebloods despised me so. He replied, 'What if the difference between social strata stem not from genomics or inherent xcellence or even dollars, but merely differences in knowledge? Would this not mean the whole Pyramid is built on shifting sands?... fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' consciences; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding up the mirror

Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms around the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.

As long as you can Houdini your way out of the Sisyphean constraints then originality happens.

Me, I want to bloody kick this moronic bloody world in the bloody teeth over and over till it bloody understands that not hurting people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right.

A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.

Truth is singular. Its 'versions' are mistruths.

- This isn't an interrogation or a trail. Your version of the truth is the only thing that matters. -Truth is singular. It's 'versions' are mistruths.

I think words operate like musical notes that the eyeball hears.

People are obscenities. Would rather be music than be a mass of tubes squeezing semisolids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it'll no longer function.

Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.

For white men, to live is to own, or to try to own more, or to die trying to own more. Their appetites are astonishing! They own wardrobes, slaves, carriages, houses, warehouses, and ships. They own ports, cities, plantations, valleys, mountains, chains of islands. They own this world, its jungles, its skies, and its seas. Yet they complain that Dejima is a prison. They complain they are not free.

Better a soulless clone... than a souled roach.

Killing depends on circumstances, as you'd expect, whether it's a cold, planned murder, or a hot death in a fight, or inspired by honor or a more shameful motive. However many times you kill, though, it's the first that matters. It's a man's first blood that banishes him from the world of the ordinary.

Only the trombonist played on. That's trombonists for you.

Southly thru shrubby heath we tromped now till we got to wideway. Wideway I'd heard o' from storymen an' here it was, an open, long, flat o' roadstone. SAplin's'n'bush was musclin' up but wondersome'n'wild was that windy space.

You have to know someone intimately to be able to love them. So love at first sight is a contradiction in terms. Unless in that first sight there's some sort of mystical gigabyte downloading of information from one mind into the other.

A dinery server behaving like a pureblood attracts trouble; trouble attracts blame; blame demands a scrapegoat.

The art teacher's scarlet book was called Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille. 'As the title suggests,' Mr Dunwoody saw the book'd caught my attention, 'it's about the history of opticians. What are you about?

Fantasy. Lunacy.All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities.

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?

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

Survival often demands our courage.

Do," said Louisa finally, "whatever you can't not do.

Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction

What man ain't the honestest cove in his own eyes?" Grote's round face is a bronze moon in the dark. "'Tain't good intentions what paves the road to hell: it's self-justifyin's.

After ten pages I felt that Nietzsche was reading me, not I him.

The truth of a myth, your Honor, is not its words but its patterns.

The library refused many downloads, of course, but I succeeded with two Optimists translated from the Late English, Orwell and Huxley;

If consumers found fulfillment at any meaningful level, she extemporized, corpocracy would be finished.

So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?

Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' conscience; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding the mirror."I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves.Mephi replied, "History suggests, not until they are made to.

The double-crossed, might-have-been history of my country is not the study of what actually took place here: it's the study of historians' studies. . . .Memories are their own descendants masquerading as the ancestors of the present.

Such narrative arcs make good movies but shitty existences.

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love.

When you write it, don't write it in the manner of a spooky story. Don't try to give an explanation. Just say that I don't know what to make of it, just write it like I tell it, so the reader can make up his own mind.

Politicians and sports coaches both need to be smart enough to master the game, but dumb enough to think it matters.

Integrity is a bugger, it really is. Lying can get you into difficulties, but to really wind up in the crappers try telling nothing but the truth.

Teachers're always using that "in your own words." I hate that. Authors knit their sentences tight. It's their job. Why make us unpick them, just to put it back together more shonkily? How're you s'posed to say Kapellmeister if you can't say Kapellmeister?

Any society's upper-crust is riddled with immorality, how else d'you think they keep their power? Reputation is king of the public sphere, not private. It is dethroned by public acts.

People buy such bollocks at museums. They don't know what else to do once they're there.

How gleefully life shreds our well crafted plans.

Our ancestors built temples for their gods. We build department stores.

Hey, metaphysics seminar is on the roof. Just take the elevator up and keep walking until you hit the sidewalk. Anything is true if enough people believe it.

... in a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only "rights", the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful.

As for reading, I wish I had a magic door to a library where I could go in, read for days and days, and come back in the same minute I left. I'm still looking for the door.

Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman. Every time I've stepped through its wide-open doorway, I find myself stepping out on the street again.

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

The sacred is a fine hiding place for the profane.

Wars do not combust without warning. They begin as little fires over the horizon. Wars approach. A wise man watches for the smoke, and prepares to vacate the neighborhood just like Ayrs and Jocasta. My worry is that the next war will be so big, nowhere with a decent restaurant will be left untouched.

I'd love to know how Dad saw me when I was 6. I'd love to know a hundred things. When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist. I never imagined how hungry I'd be one day to look inside it.

Trees're always a relief, after people.

At dawn the waves looked like mountain ranges tipped with gold as sunbeams slanted low under burgundy clouds.

A volley of hailstones began abruptly, filled the woods with a frenzied percussion & ended on the sudden.

One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards will be at one's throat all the sooner.

Disco's are tricky. You look a total wally if you dance too early but after one crucial song tips the disco over, you look a sad saddo if you don't.

Sometimes language can't even read the music of meaning.

Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don't remember summer even saying goodbye.

...there ain't no journey what don't change you some.

Every nowhere is somewhere[...]

Go to hell, Willy, our souls eat poetry, but one has seven deadly sins to feed!

It's a small world. It keeps recrossing itself.

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.

Oh, diplomacy ... it mops up war's spillages; legitimizes its outcomes; gives the strong state the means to impose its will on a weaker one, while saving its fleets and battalions for weightier opponents.

The her that lived in her looked out through her eyes, through my eyes, and at the me that lives in me.

True knowledge without xperience is food without sustenance

... but it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrefaction is concealed for a few decades, that is all.

Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty.

I believe there is another world waiting for us. A better world. And I'll be waiting for you there.

Yay, Old'uns' Smart mastered sicks, miles, seeds an' made miracles ord'nary, but it din't master one thing, nay, a hunger in the hearts o' humans, yay, a hunger for more.

Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an' tho' a cloud's shape nor hue nor size don't stay the same, it's still a cloud an' so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud's blowed from or who the soul'll be 'morrow? Only Sonmi the east an' the west an' the compass an' the atlas, yay, only the atlas o' clouds.

It's true that stammerers can become more adept at sentence construction.