David Mitchell Quotes

The entertainment industry is loaded with extraordinarily talented people. But the true, genuine originals, they're rare.

Columbus's eggs lie around by the hundreds of thousands, but Columbuses are met with less frequency.

We have something that is unique. We have our craft. We have our art. We have our desire.

Genius resembles a bell; in order to ring it must be suspended into pure air, and when a foreign body touches it, its joyful toneis silenced.

Write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

Perhaps our originality manifests itself most strikingly in what we do with that which we did not originate. To discover something wholly new can be a matter of chance, of idle tinkering, or even of the chronic dissatisfaction of the untalented.

That's why I like you. Do you realize how rare it is to come across a hot girl who creates a adjectival version of the word pedophile? You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are.

From now on - specialize; never again make any concession to the ninety-nine percent of you which is like everyon else at the expense of the one percent which is unique.

We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities.

He misses the feeling of creating something out of something. That’s right — something out of something. Because something out of nothing is when you make something up out of thin air, in which case it has no value. Anybody can do that. But something out of something means it was really there the whole time, inside you, and you discover it as part of something new, that’s never happened before.

The imitator dooms himself to hopeless mediocrity. The inventor did it because it was natural to him, and so in him it has a charm. In the imitator something else is natural, and he bereaves himself of his own beauty, to come short of another man's.

I never wanted to be well-rounded. I do not admire well-rounded people nor their work. So far as I can see, nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design.

A genius is the one most like himself.

Every person born in this world represents something new, something that never existed before, something original and unique.

I didn't think of myself as importing, I thought it was more interesting to write about things people didn't know about than what they did. When I became aware that I was in fact "importing", I stopped doing it.

The principal mark of genius is not perfection, but originality.

Your best work is your expression of yourself. Now, you may not be the greatest at it, but when you do it, you're the only expert.

Genius discovers a system; average talent stereotypes it till it is shattered by fresh genius.

Don't try to be original. Be simple. Be good technically, and if there is something in you, it will come out.

[On Lisa Kudrow:] She's like the best kind of jazz there is. You don't know what note she's going to hit and it's always a surprise.

Nature never repeats herself, and the possibilities of one human soul will never be found in another.

I dare affirm that any artist... who has nothing singular, eccentric, or at least reputed to be so, in his person, will never become a superior talent.

Anybody who is any good is different from anybody else.

If you're really special, meaning you're doing something unique and original, it could scare people.

I fear uniformity. You cannot manufacture great men any more than you can manufacture gold.