David Mitchell

I think the story is the most ancient form of human entertainment.

Perhaps all human interaction is about wanting and getting.

I'm from a time and place where bigheadedness was a really savage crime, and you'd get cut down for it by your peers and parents.

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.

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.

You can't be a part-time Richard Dawkins.

Many children are natural fantasists, I think, perhaps because their imaginations have yet to be clobbered into submission by experience.

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.

There's a disease that young writers are susceptible to, which is, I will do this because I can - hubris, I suppose - without stopping to work out why.

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

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.

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.