David Mitchell
David Mitchell
English stand up comedian and half of the comedy duo Mitchell and Webb, alongside Robert Webb. He is best known for starring in and writing the Channel 4 series Peep Show, for which he won the British Academy Television Award for Best Comedy Performance in 2009. He has also written and starred in several sketch shows including The Mitchell and Webb Situation, That Mitchell and Webb Sound and, That Mitchell and Webb Look.
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionComedian
Date of Birth14 July 1974
CitySalisbury, England
A novelist needs to know his own strong points and weak points.
For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.
I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.
It's true, reading too many novels makes you go blind.
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.
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.
It is a worry. Eventually something's got to give between how much we own and how much space we live in.
Our running game has been struggling, and the key was to try to get on top of these guys early and work the ground game. We wanted to develop some confidence in our running game, which we did tonight.
My books are anti-absolutist and deeply distrustful of any religious stance that precludes the validity of any other.
When I was about 14, in about 1984, I decided to become a great poet. Faber & Faber was going to publish me, and when Ted Hughes read my first anthology he would invite me to Yorkshire for meat pies and mentorship.
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.
Little girls are like old cats. If they don't like you nothing on Earth will make them pretend to.
She has to lose her pre-Copernican view of a universe revolving around herself.
When you're out of your own cultural context you have conversations with yourself that you just don't have at any other point in your life. When you're in a hotel room on the border between India and Nepal you can really discover things about yourself.