David Mitchell

Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my year's fragments into a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late.

Like Solzhenitsyn, I shall return, one bright dusk.

As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory.

If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, __hen you__e ready_.

Reading off a page is like looking down at a landscape from a balloon _ your eye "sees" the story as well as reads it, its layout, its paragraphs and structure, and "remembers" what it just read because it's still there, on the page, simultaneously. If you want to, you can reread any line instantly; or linger; or speed up; or optically "flinch." Reading a series of tweets is more like looking through a narrow window from a train speeding through a landscape full of tunnels and bands of light and dark. Each tweet erases its predecessor.

Now I seen Mauna Kena from Honokaa b'fore, o'course, but a mountain you're planning on climbin' ain't the same as the one you ain't. It ain't so pretty, nay.

Leaves turned to soil beneath my feet. Thus it is, trees eat themselves.

Trees, their incremental gymnastics and noisy silence, are another wonder of Outside to me.

Neither of us had anything to say, or rather we had everything to say, but after all those nights of not saying a word, we suddenly found we had not one dollar of time left between us.

She was widely read enough to appreciate my literary wit but not so widely read that she knew my sources. I like that in a woman.

He thinks of the all steps that gathered this party and marvels at the weaverless looms of fortune.

I__ always worried but kissing__ not so tricky. Your lips know what to do, just like sea anenomes know what to do. Kissing spins you, like Flying Tea-Cups. Oxygen the girl breathes out, you breathe in.

Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don't remember summer even saying goodbye.

If losers can exploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term.

Will I be some kid__ dad one day? Are any future people lurking deep inside mine?...Which girl__ carrying the other half of my kid, deep in those intricate loops? What__ she doing right now? What__ her name?

If consumers found fulfillment at any meaningful level, she extemporized, corpocracy would be finished.

Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman. Every time I've stepped through its wide-open doorway, I find myself stepping out on the street again.

Politicians and sports coaches both need to be smart enough to master the game, but dumb enough to think it matters.