Literary Birthday – 12 January – David Mitchell

Happy Birthday, David Mitchell, born on 12 January 1969.

David Mitchell Quotes

1. A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.
2. If you show someone something you’ve written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.
3. Writing is probably one-fifth coming up with the stuff, and four-fifths self-editing again and again and again.
4. 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.
5. I’m certainly a plot and character man. Themes, structure, style – they’re valid components of a novel, and you can’t complete the book without them. But I think what propels me as a reader is plot and character.
6. A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it.
7. 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.
8. The healthy can’t understand the emptied, the broken.
9. 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.
10. Books don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.

David Mitchell is a New York Times bestselling English novelist. He has written nine novels, including Number9Dream and Cloud Atlas, which were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He makes use of slipstream fiction techniques in his writing. He was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize twice. In 2007, Mitchell was listed among Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in The World. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2013.  His latest book is Utopia Avenue. Follow him on Facebook.

Source for Image

by Amanda Patterson
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