" The best critics perform an important function, but it’s not one I’m hard-wired to do. I just find it exhausting having to marshal arguments and defend them against possible objectors. An analogy I often use is that writers are like duck-billed platypuses and critics are taxonomists, and to us duck-billed platypuses the question of whether we should be considered as an egg-laying mammal or what is a pointless exercise. A duck-billed platypus is interested in swimming, finding food, having sex, laying eggs. A novelist’s job is to write a novel, not worry about how it fits into one’s oeuvre or whether it captures the postmodern experience or whatnot. It might be my own ignorance. Perhaps there are writers who consider such things, but I’m really just interested in finding out where a story goes and helping it get there. There are beautiful, magical descriptions of the nighttime in the beginning of Huck Finn—I’ve never wanted to dissect that magic, I just want to read it and experience it.

— david mitchell on critics, in this interview with the rumpus.