David Mitchell Quotes

Writers such as Richard Powers and the late David Foster Wallace have shown the path to a newer generation of writers for whom all national boundaries are quaint curiosities.

A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translations.

To be honest, I'm not that much of a reader of Korean fiction, since so little is translated.

Since its beginnings, American writing has been in dialogue with other literatures.

Shakespeare is as naturally a part of American culture as it is the British culture; the Americans have a natural interest in their heritage.

National literature does not mean much these days; now is the age of world literature, and every one must contribute to hasten thearrival of that age.

The literature of the world has exerted its power by being translated.

In America there is really very little knowledge of the literature of the rest of the world. Of the literature of Latin America, yes, But that's not all that different in inspiration from that of America, or of Europe. One must go further. You don't even have to go too far in terms of geography - you can start with the Native Americans and listen to their poetry.

When I began to read as an adult, I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date. When you become published and become a reviewer, piles of books come along and you are pushed by fashion and what you are commissioned to do.

I don't think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality.

Nothing like this has been attempted before. (...) It might be called a literary Porto Alegre. That implies a beginning, with much fierce argument and discussion to come. But whatever the outcome of ensuing criticisms or objections, The World Republic of Letters -- empire more than republic, as Casanova shows -- is likely to have the same sort of liberating impact at large as Said's Orientalism, with which it stands comparison.

Indonesian writers are so far behind in terms of global exposure compared with the Philippines and Japanese writers.

American fiction is good. It would be nice if somebody read it.

I've always loved books by the Bronte sisters. I love Jane Austen, too. I'm more influenced by people like her than by pop culture.

As publishers focus on blockbusters, they steadily lose interest in little-known authors from other countries.

The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact opposite: British fiction is cool, American naff.

It seems to me that in literature, books have always been answers to other books.

Literatures, like trees and plants, are born of a land and in it flourish and die. But literatures, also like plants, may be carried abroad to take root in a foreign soil.

We had all these famous writers in Sweden and from all over the world home at dinner. I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be a highbrow writer as my father. He never, ever read anything like crime novels. He wrote biographies of Dante, James Joyce, August Strindberg and Joseph Conrad.

I'm definitely more influenced by European writers than I am by American writers, there's no doubt about that.

The intercourse between the Mediterranean and the North or between the Atlantic and Central Europe was never purely economic or political; it also meant the exchange of knowledge and ideas and the influence of social institutions and artistic and literary forms.

One effect that the Nobel Prize seems to have had is that more Arabic literary works have been translated into other languages.

There are now 30-year-old Mexican writers who do great novels in which Mexico isn't even mentioned.

I read Carver. Julio Cortazar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me.

Reading was such a formative part of my childhood (along with 'Loony Tunes'), that it is difficult to pin point the most influential book. But, under an interrogation light I would probably have to say 'Jane Eyre' by Charlotte Bronte.