Adrian Mitchell

I want to speak, to sing to total strangers. It's my way of talking to the world.

I use the language I use to my friends. They wouldn't believe me if I used some high-flown literary language. I want them to believe me.

There have always been poets who performed. Blake sang his Songs of Innocence and Experience to parties of friends.

I'll be writing essays long after I've stopped writing fiction. There is this unusually broad range in the non-fiction, but if you look at what I'm capable of as a novelist, I'm more limited.

Well, I actually wrote her a letter a couple of days ago congratulating her. The tone I tried to convey in the letter is, look, you are a part of a great American historical process.

I grow daily to honour facts more and more, and theory less and less. A fact, it seems to me, is a great thing; a sentence printed, if not by God, then at least by the Devil.