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
Write something every single day, even if it's just three lines. And it doesn't matter if it's any good - just write something every day.
Writing is probably one-fifth coming up with the stuff, and four-fifths self-editing again and again and again.
I can write pretty much anywhere.
I got a rejection letter from an editor at HarperCollins, who included a report from his professional reader. This report shredded my first-born novel, laughed at my phrasing, twirled my lacy pretensions around and gobbed into the seething mosh pit of my stolen clichés. As I read the report, the world became very quiet and stopped rotating. What poisoned me was the fact that the report's criticisms were all absolutely true. The sound of my landlady digging in the garden got the world moving again. I slipped the letter into the trash... knowing I'd remember every word.
Lunatics are writers whose works write them.
Writing is such a damn lonely sickness.
How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards would be at one's throat all the sooner.
I am going to tell you a secret. Everything is about wanting. Everything. Things happen because of people wanting. Watch closely, and you’ll see what I mean.
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.