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
As long as our civilisation keeps trundling along generally forwards, then there is the possibility of a future where ethnicity is merely an interesting badge, not a uniform you can't take off.
Only professional diplomats, inveterate idiots and women view diplomacy as a long-term substitute for war.
The music provokes a sharp longing the music soothes.
You can maintain power over people, as long as you give them something. Rob a man of everything, and that man will no longer be in your power.
As long as you can Houdini your way out of the Sisyphean constraints then originality happens.
If losers can exploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term.
When I talk about my artist parents, people imagine a bohemian environment and think, 'Aha, so that's where he gets it from!' But we were as white, straight, and middle-class as the next family on our white, straight, middle-class housing estate.
The words 'maybe' and 'perhaps' are literally the same - the flavor is the same, the educational level is the same. But you just know when to use maybe and when to use perhaps. I think it's because of this: You get to know the tastes or musical tastes of words themselves, and this informs your choice, whether you use them or not.
There's been very little writing about speech impediments, even though it's this huge psychological barrier.
The state of childhood resonates with life inside a fantasy novel. If you have no control over how you spend large chunks of your day, or are at the mercy of flawed giant beings, then the desire to bend the laws of the world by magic is strong and deep.
Perhaps where text slides toward ambiguity, film inclines to specificity. A novel contains as many versions of itself as it has readers, whereas a film's final cut vaporizes every other way it might have been made.
There's a disease that young writers are susceptible to, which is, I will do this because I can - hubris, I suppose - without stopping to work out why.
If the human condition were the periodic table, maybe love would be hydrogen at No. 1. Death would be helium at No. 2. Power, I reckon, would be where oxygen is.
I don't have problems starting writing. I have problems stopping. I'm one of the last dads to arrive at school to collect the kids, because I want to get this paragraph just right.