Your environment affects you wherever you are.
From David Mitchell
Many children are natural fantasists, I think, perhaps because their imaginations have yet to be clobbered into submission by experience.
People like to say that East Asians in general, and Japanese in particular, are not very expressive: there's that term 'inscrutable.' But often, Europeans just don't get the Asian codes. Believe me, the message is being expressed OK.
When you're out of your own cultural context you have conversations with yourself that you just don't have at any other point in your life. When you're in a hotel room on the border between India and Nepal you can really discover things about yourself.
I've become a less brave traveller since I became a dad, but in the past I was more foolhardy than brave.
Writing is probably one-fifth coming up with the stuff, and four-fifths self-editing again and again and again.
Perhaps all human interaction is about wanting and getting.
I'm certainly a plot and character man. Themes, structure, style - they're valid components of a novel and you can't complete the book without them. But I think what propels me as a reader is plot and character.
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.
I'm not from a milieu where high-register language or philosophical ideas were welcome.
3 perspectives
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