David Mitchell Quotes

I would very much like to become a best-selling author.

If I can hit No. 1 on the 'New York Times' best-seller list, I'm thinking of having the entire list tattooed on my body somewhere. It would be fabulous.

Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.

Most people I know don't even realize I'm an award-winning author, but I have gotten many opportunities to travel to places I'd never have visited otherwise.

You get early inoculation against the idea of success if you're a poet. When I published my first collection of sonnets, I sold about five copies; now kids study them for A level. Wanting to be successful in that other world of money or fame is not interesting. Poetry isn't like that, and it never has been.

I don't aspire at present to be king of the hill in American literature.

I'd only been in the business three or four years, but I told myself that someday I'd like to be Mort Janklow.

The important thing is to do what you most love in the best way. If you love literature, you could be a great writer and perhaps one day become a Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature.

There are writers who go their whole lives and never hit that No. 1 spot.

Whenever anyone calls me 'The new J..K. Rowling,' I think, 'What's wrong with the old one?'

The great American novel has not only already been written, it has already been rejected.

I'm like a unicorn; I'm a midlist writer who hasn't done anything else but write. But because I wasn't amazingly famous, I didn't become Stephanie Meyer, or even a huge literary name like a Jonathan Franzen or a Joshua Ferris.

We sold 400 books of poetry and thought we were well on the way to immortality.

Writers are not celebrities, so you don't expect to walk down the street and hear, 'Oh my God, there's Sylvia Day.' You prefer to be anonymous.

I've had great writing teachers and mentors and great success with my first book.

I haven't been the kind of writer about whom book-length academic studies have been written.

I don't think you can ever assess your work. I don't think Turgenev could assess his any more than I can assess mine, and his didn't have a social impact as much as great literary impact.

I never expected any sort of success with 'Mockingbird'... I sort of hoped someone would like it enough to give me encouragement.

I'd been writing poems for many years, but most of them I didn't like. Then, when I was 23, I wrote one I did like, sent it to 'The Paris Review' - the highest publication I could think of - and they accepted it. No other moment in my literary life has quite come close to that.

I have great family and good friends; the stories I told became popular, and people all over the world bought them.

I've heard people, usually writers, say that no one wrote a great book after winning the Booker, but I honestly did not feel any big pressure. 'The Gathering' did hang over me in that it was darker than I thought at the time.

If I could wave a magic wand and be anything, I'd be a really respected, really successful author. That's a hard combination to get, though. I really enjoy acting, and it's easier, frankly.

I didn't know it was possible to be successful as a writer, so I wasn't afraid to fail.

As a young poet, you need corroboration, and that's what publication does.

I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.