David Mitchell

Award won Role or nomination

1. 1969 age 0

   Born

2. 2012 age 43

   CreditCloud Atlas

3. 2021 age 52

   CreditThe Matrix Resurrectionsscreenwriter

• LWLana Wachowski3 titles
• JTJohn Toll3 titles
• TTTom Tykwer3 titles
• LWLilly Wachowski2 titles
• TWthe Wachowskis2 titles
• GHGrant Hill2 titles
• BSBrian J. Smith2 titles
• AHAleksandar Hemon2 titles
• JKJohnny Klimek2 titles
• MRMax Riemelt2 titles

• Influenced by

  • NGNeil Gaiman
  • VNVladimir Nabokov
  • JBJohn Banville
  • ICItalo Calvino

Nothing recorded for: Spouse, Partner, Parents, Children, Siblings, Studied under, Taught.

• Ghostwritten’s secret agenda is to offer up eight different answers to the question, "Why do things happen?" so it has the right to monkey about with time and history. number9dreams’s secret agenda is to offer eight different answers to the question, "In what space does the mind operate?"

  David Mitchell (author), CC BY-SA 4.0

• What do I miss? Second-hand bookshops where I can find things I had no idea I wanted. AbeBooks helps, but it doesn't have that smell.

  David Mitchell (author), CC BY-SA 4.0

• What is this thing, "imagination?" A muscle that can be "forced" or "stretched"? Or something immune to the ethos of ganbaru [grit it out, or strive for one's best]? Like the relativist's view of light, it is both wave and particle, depending on what you want it to be. The verb "to imagine" is both active and passive, as in "Steve imagined his future," and "Such a future was never imagined." So, I work on my novel by imagining the world of 18th-century Nagasaki and its people and their fears and desires, as an act of will, and a lot of will is involved, believe me. However, I could ganbaru until I'm blue in the face. If my imagination doesn't work "passively" or even "intransitively," at its own behest rather than mine, and come up with cliche-demolishing twists of phrase and turns of plot and happy accidents and unexpected reactions from characters, then the book will be sterile. Well-written with luck, and even intelligent, but sterile. (...) Imagination is what makes art fertile.

  David Mitchell (author), CC BY-SA 4.0

• As long as you can Houdini your way out of the Sisyphean constraints then originality happens.

  David Mitchell (author), CC BY-SA 4.0

• Right now I’m working on a book set in the thirty years on either side of 2010, but I shouldn’t give too many details or the next thing you know it’s on Wikipedia and if I change my mind and decide to recast King Lear in a pond of frogs and toads I’ll just give a hardworking Wikipedian an extra headache.

  David Mitchell (author), CC BY-SA 4.0

• Perhaps the best answer is that the writer that I am has been shaped by the stammering kid that I was, and that although my stammer didn’t make me write, it did, in part, inform and influence the writer I became. It’s true that stammerers can become more adept at sentence construction. Synonyms aren’t always neatly interchangeable. Sometimes choosing word B over word A requires you to construct a different sentence to house it—and quickly, too, before your listener smells the stammering rat.

  David Mitchell (author), CC BY-SA 4.0