David Mitchell

Survival often demands our courage.

I watched the stars and thought of other lives.

What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence, is the instrument of this dreadful will. You can see the will to power in bedrooms, kitchens, factories, unions and the borders of states. Listen to this and remember it. The nation state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions. QED, nations are entities whose laws are written by violence. Thus it ever was, so ever shall it be.

Patience's design flaw became obvious for the first time in my life: the outcome is decided not during the course of play but when the cards are shuffled, before the game even begins. How pointless is that?

But thought has no eyelids to close or ears to block...

Such narrative arcs make good movies but shitty existences.

Holly rubs her temples. __re we talking ... vampires?__rkady groans. __n, the V-word! Here it comes again.

You groan and shake your head, Sixsmith, I know, but you smile too, which is why I love you.

The novelist is more like a pregnant woman who delivers her own child unaided. A messy procedure, with lots of groaning.

A writer flirts with schizophrenia, nurtures synesthesia, and embraces obsessive-compulsive disorder. Your art feeds on you, your soul, and, yes, to a degree, your sanity. Writing novels worth reading will bugger up your mind, jeopardize your relationships, and distend your life. You have been warned.

Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable haemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed. Like Schrödinger__ cat inside a box you can never ever open.

Taro taught me that people respect spirit, but even cowards don't respect cowards.

Rootlessness," I opine, "is the twenty-first century norm.""You're not wrong and that's why we're in the shit we're in, mate. If you belong nowhere, why give a tinker's toss about anywhere?

So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?

When you write it, don't write it in the manner of a spooky story. Don't try to give an explanation. Just say that I don't know what to make of it, just write it like I tell it, so the reader can make up his own mind.

Lunatics are writers whose works write them, Bat." "Not all lunatics are writers, Mrs. Rey-believe me." "But most writers are lunatics, Bat-believe me. The human world is made up of stories, not people.

But this isn't a ghost story: the ghost is in the background, where she has to be. If she was in the foreground she'd be a person.

Only I don't close my eyes these days, because it hurts too much when I open them.