David Mitchell Quotes

I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.

Covers matter. In my experience, a different cover can make you think you're reading an entirely different book.

In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.

reading is a private act, private even from the person who wrote the book. Once the novel is out there, the author is beside the point. The reader and the book have their own relationship now, and should be left alone to work things out for themselves.

Even today, I hunt for the fabulous books that will change me utterly. I find myself happiest in the middle of a book which I forget that I am reading, but am instead immersed in a made-up life lived at the highest pitch.

Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

Whether it is fun to go to bed with a good book depends a great deal on who's reading it.

The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.

With the audience I write for, I want to make sure that the reader is eagerly turning every page. I want each of my books to be an absorbing reading experience, an authentic piece of literature. The worst thing that can happen is for a book to have a chilling effect on the reader, to have a kid pick it up and look at a bunch of footnotes and think, No, I'm not going to read this, it's too intimidating.

People should decide on the books' meanings for themselves. They'll find a story that attacks such things as cruelty, oppression, intolerance, unkindness, narrow-mindedness, and celebrates love, kindness, open-mindedness, tolerance, curiosity, human intelligence.

When I take up a book I have read before, I know what to expect; the satisfaction is not lessened by being anticipated. I shake hands with, and look our old tried and valued friend in the face,--compare notes and chat the hour away.

To read a novel is to wonder constantly, even at moments when we lose ourselves most deeply in the book: How much of this is fantasy, and how much is real?

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy the intercourse with superior minds.

The power of reading a great book is that you start thinking like the author. For those magical moments while you are immersed in the forests of Arden, you are William Shakespeare; while you are shipwrecked on Treasure Island, you are Robert Louis Stevenson; while you are communing with nature at Walden, you are Henry David Thoreau. You start to think like they think, feel like they feel, and use imagination as they would. Their references become your own, and you carry these with you long after you've turned the last page.

Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.

I prefer reading e-books on a high resolution LCD screen - like the iPod Touch's - although the pixel density could and should be much higher.

Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.

Once you've put one of his [Henry James] books down, you simply can't pick it up again.

Sometime during your life—in fact, very soon—you may find yourself reading a book, and you may notice that a book’s first sentence can often tell you what sort of story your book contains.

Reading ... changes you. You aren't the same person after you've read a particular book as you were before, and you will read the next book, unless both are Harlequin Romances, in a slightly different way.

I feel lucky that I read so many books as a kid because I know that no matter how much I appreciate a book now, and I can love a book very much, it's never going to be that childhood passion for a book. There's some element, something special about the way they're reading books and experiencing books that's finite.

What I really mean is that a great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.

I love the apparent quiet of reading a book. You sit there; you're not really moving. It looks very solitary. It looks very boring, but actually it's the most exciting place because it's going on for you, and you're in that relationship. In that sense, it's like being with a lover. Nobody else can intrude on that space. It's the two of you. It's your own world.

I like things to be really, really funny, or really, really dramatic. Those books are certainly the ones that grab me. I like the exercise of reading through a paragraph, and it's just torture. I try not to have my eyes dart to the right. That's the stuff that I love.

I leafed through the pages, inhaling the enchanted scent of promise that comes with all new books, and stopped to read the start of a sentence that caught my eye.