David Mitchell

“Words are what you fight with but what you fight about is whether or not you’re afraid of them.”

“I think we think in terms of stories.”

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

“People pontificate, "Suicide is selfishness." Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call in a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reason: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“I've never listened to music lying down. Listening's reading if you close your eyes.Music's a wood you walk through.”

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

“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.”

“...it’s not just the person who fills a house, it’s their I’ll be back later!s, their toothbrushes and unused hats and coats, their belongingnesses.”

“How gleefully life shreds our well crafted plans.”

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

“Mother used to say escape is never further than the nearest book.”

“So little is actually worthy of belief or disbelief. Better to strive to coexist than seek to disapprove . . .”

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

“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 put it to the great man [Hitchcock], the key to fictitious terror is partition or containment: so long as the Bates Motel is sealed off from our world, we want to peer in, like at a scorpion enclosure. But a film that shows the world is a Bates Motel, well, that's... the stuff of Buchloe, dystopia, depression. We'll dip our toes in a predatory, amoral, godless unive3rse, but only our toes.”

“What's the book like?""Well, some of it's twaddle, but mostly it's just piffle. Cheers!”

“When you win, the rules change, and you find you’ve lost”