David Mitchell

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.

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 can't bear living in this huge beautiful world and not try to imitate it as best I can.

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.

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

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

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

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 had a happy childhood.

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.

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

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