Top 53 Quotes by David Mitchell

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.

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.

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.

Perhaps where text slides toward ambiguity, film inclines to specificity. A novel contains as many versions of itself as it has readers, whereas a film's final cut vaporizes every other way it might have been made.

People like to say that East Asians in general, and Japanese in particular, are not very expressive: there's that term 'inscrutable.' But often, Europeans just don't get the Asian codes. Believe me, the message is being expressed OK.