David Mitchell

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.

For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.

If the human condition were the periodic table, maybe love would be hydrogen at No. 1. Death would be helium at No. 2. Power, I reckon, would be where oxygen is.

I always dreamed of writing in an orchestral context. But when you finish a piece, you want to hear it. So we played everything with Phish.

I like involved projects. I'm driven by the idea of characters and the song-cycle form is similar to a musical.

We had an eyeball-to-eyeball agreement at a restaurant before I came back that, if I came back, he would never talk to me that way again or I was simply saying no.