David Mitchell (author)

“Courage is the highest quality for a soldier, but technology is a fine substitute.”

“The body is the outermost layer of the mind.”

“Whoever dies with the most stuff wins.”

“Lunatics are writers whose works write them.”

“The most malicious god is the god of the counted chicken.”

“I have always preferred maps to books. They don't answer you back.”

“Perhaps the best answer is that the writer that I am has been shaped by the stammering kid that I was, and that although my stammer didn’t make me write, it did, in part, inform and influence the writer I became. It’s true that stammerers can become more adept at sentence construction. Synonyms aren’t always neatly interchangeable. Sometimes choosing word B over word A requires you to construct a different sentence to house it—and quickly, too, before your listener smells the stammering rat.”

“Right now I’m working on a book set in the thirty years on either side of 2010, but I shouldn’t give too many details or the next thing you know it’s on Wikipedia and if I change my mind and decide to recast King Lear in a pond of frogs and toads I’ll just give a hardworking Wikipedian an extra headache.”

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

“What do I miss? Second-hand bookshops where I can find things I had no idea I wanted. AbeBooks helps, but it doesn't have that smell.”

“Ghostwritten’s secret agenda is to offer up eight different answers to the question, "Why do things happen?" so it has the right to monkey about with time and history. number9dreams’s secret agenda is to offer eight different answers to the question, "In what space does the mind operate?"”