David Mitchell Quotes & Sayings

Beware of asking people to question what's real and what isn't. They may reach conclusions you didn't see coming. — David Mitchell

The most malicious god is the god of the counted chicken. — David Mitchell

It'll be all right." Julia's gentleness makes it worse. "In the end, Jace."
"It doesn't feel very all right."
"That's because it's not the end. — David Mitchell

Men invented money Women invented mutual aid — David Mitchell

Don't mess with the fairies. — David Mitchell

I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels. — David Mitchell

Her only friends on the estate were books, and books can talk but do not listen. — David Mitchell

Control is about fear, see. If you're afraid enough of the reprisals, you don't say no, you don't fight back, you don't run away. Saying yes is how you survive. It becomes normal. — David Mitchell

Men have imagined republics and principalities that never really existed at all. Yet the way men live is so far removed from the way they ought to live that anyone who abandons what 'is' for what 'should be' pursues his downfall rather than his preservation; for a man who strives after goodness in all his acts is sure to come to ruin, since there are so many men who are not good. — David Mitchell

Shiroyama's heart stops. The earth's pulse beats against his ear.
An inch away is a go clamshell stone, perfect and smooth ...
... a black butterfly lands on the white stone, and unfolds its wings. — David Mitchell

War's an auction where whoever can pay the most in damage and still be standing wins. — David Mitchell

Eva knows I'm terra incognita and explores me unhurriedly, like you did. Because she's lean as a boy. Because her scent is almonds, meadow grass. Because if I smile at her ambition to be an Egyptologist, she kicks my shin under the table. Because she makes me think about something other than myself. Because even when serious she shines. Because she prefers travelogues to Sir Walter Scott, prefers Billy Mayerl to Mozart, and couldn't tell a C major from a sergeant major. Because I, only I, see her smile a fraction before it reaches her face. Because Emperor Robert is not a good man - his best part is commandeered by his unperformed music - but she gives me that rarest smile, anyway. Because we listened to nightjars. Because her laughter spurts through a blowhole in the top of her head and sprays all over the morning. Because a man like me has no business with this substance "beauty," yet here she is, in these soundproof chambers of my heart. — David Mitchell

Apparently, presenters of BBC shows are supposed to be impartial. I'm not entirely clear what that means. It is sensible that people presenting programmes shouldn't secretly be in the pay of McDonald's, Ukip or the Pipe Smoker of the Year organisation. — David Mitchell

In March of 1915, all three of Lord and Lady Chetwynd-Pitt's sons'd been gassed, blown up or machine-gunned in the very same week at the battle of Neuve-Chapelle. All three. Imagine that: On Monday, you've got three sons, by Friday you've got none. Lady Albertina had just, y'know, caved in. Physically, mentally, spiritually, brutally. — David Mitchell

I remain thankful to God for all his mercies. — David Mitchell

I got a six'n'six so maybe my luck was healin', so I thinked, fool o' fate what I am, yay, what we all are. — David Mitchell

I would agree with your statement that many of my protagonists are outsiders. I wonder if we all are, and even people who don't think they are, and they're just better at masking it. When we shut our bedroom door at night, however well-integrated we think we are with the rest of society, maybe there's something illusory about that ... — David Mitchell

Grief's a bastard, it really is - pardon my French. It makes everything else harder. — David Mitchell

This isn't lust. Lust wants, does the obvious, and pads back into the forest. Love is greedier. Love wants round-the-clock care; protection; rings, vows, joint accounts; scented candles on birthdays; life insurance. Babies. Love's a dictator. — David Mitchell

that's like Vlad the Impaler calling Maggie Thatcher a bit insensitive. — David Mitchell

Scholars discern motions of history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules, only outcomes. What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts and virtuous acts. What precipitates acts? Belief. — David Mitchell

Answering the question 'How would you like to smell?' by saying 'I'd rather I didn't' is also no longer acceptable. It's not playing the game. Men are expected to put some cash into the cosmetic pot too - it's seen as almost un-feminist not to. What a uniquely capitalist response to that gender inequality: women have been forced by convention for generations - millennia - to spend money on expensive clothes and agonising shoes, to daub themselves with reality-concealing slap, to smell expensively inhuman, to self-mutilate in pursuit of eternal youth; and this, quite rightly, has come to be deemed unfair. But how do we end this hell? We make men do it too. Well done everyone. — David Mitchell

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

I'm scared of the future. I'm scared of the past. I'm nervous at the moment. — David Mitchell

I wish all this never had to change, says Rafiq, unexpectedly.
I'm pleased he's content and sad that a kid so young knows that nothing lasts. — David Mitchell

I believe death is only a door. One closes, and another opens. If I were to imagine heaven, I would imagine a door opening. And he would be waiting for me there. — David Mitchell

Tokyo is a model of that serial big-bang theory of the universe. It explodes at five P.M. and people matter is hurled to the suburbs, but by 5 A.M. the people-matter gravity reasserts itself, and everything surges back toward the center, where mass densens for the next explosion. — David Mitchell

Psychological complexity, character development, the killer line to end a scene, villains blotched with virtue, heroic characters speckled with villainy, foreshadow and backflash, artful misdirection. — David Mitchell

If you don't fit into the system, the system makes life hell. — David Mitchell

I am designing the future on beer mats, like Churchill and Stalin at Yalta. — David Mitchell

And if you'd swap your metalife for a bone clock's snatched, wasted, tawdry handful of decades! — David Mitchell

They've given Harry the attributes of pistachio nuts and crack cocaine without the health risks (opening thousands of pistachio nuts can cause severe thumb-bruising, I can tell you from bitter experience of my life on the edge). — David Mitchell

Attaining immortality is easier than controlling its terms and conditions. — David Mitchell

Archivist: And what if no one believes this truth?
Sonmi~451: Someone already does. — David Mitchell

There are different ways people make this place. Sweat, exercise and pain is one way. You can see them in the gyms, in the well-ordered swimming pools. You can see them jogging in the small, worn parks. Another way to make your place is TV. A bright, brash place, always well lit, full of fun and jokes that tell you when to laugh so you never miss them. World news carefully edited so that it's not too disturbing, but disturbing enough to make you glad that you weren't born in a foreign country. News with music to tell you who to hate, who to feel sorry for, and who laugh at. — David Mitchell

Wisdom's the ultimate currency. — David Mitchell

Ultimately, wars escalate by eating their own shit, shitting bigger and eating bigger. — David Mitchell

What is "poker"? A card game where abler liars take money off less able liars. — David Mitchell

You groan and shake your head, Sixsmith, I know, but you smile too, which is why I love you. — David Mitchell

Writing's a pathology," I say. "I'd pack it in tomorrow, if I could. — David Mitchell

Who decides which defects are funny and which ones are tragic? Nobody laughs at blind people or makes iron lung jokes. — David Mitchell

For most of my life, the world shrank and technology progressed; this was the natural order of things. Few of us clocked on that "the natural order of things" is entirely man-made, and that a world that kept expanding as technology regressed was not only possible but waiting in the wings. — David Mitchell

Yet for the first time in three days, I want something. I want the forest lord to turn me into a cedar. The very oldest islanders say that if you are in the interior mountains on the night when the forest lord counts his trees, he includes you in the number and turns you into a tree. — David Mitchell

Faust tends not to have happy endings. — David Mitchell

Will I be some kid's dad one day? Are any future people lurking deep inside mine? ... Which girl's carrying the other half of my kid, deep in those intricate loops? What's she doing right now? What's her name? — David Mitchell

Persuasion is not about force; it's about showing a person a door, and making him or her desperate to open it. — David Mitchell

Prejudice is permafrost — David Mitchell

Her oil-black hair's sort of punky. She must use gel. I'd love to gel her gel in for her. — David Mitchell

History admits no rules; only outcomes. — David Mitchell

London is a language. I guess all places are. — David Mitchell

Astronomers at the University of Bullshitshire have just found new evidence that, yes, teenagers really are the center of the universe.' — David Mitchell

When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist. — David Mitchell

How could I know a famished heart will eat its mind? Can kill its body? — David Mitchell

Naming, thinks Jacob, even in ridicule, gives what is named substance. — David Mitchell

The healthy can't understand the emptied, the broken. — David Mitchell

Nothing more costly than item that has no price. — David Mitchell

In a cycle as old as tribalism, ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only "rights", the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful. — David Mitchell

If you'd cured Henry the Seventh's TB with a course of ethambutol, or given Isaac Newton an hour's access to the Hubble telescope, or shown an off-the-shelf 3-D printer to the regulars at the Captain Marlow in the 1980s, you would have had the M-word thrown your way, too. Some magic is merely normality that you're not yet used to. — David Mitchell

As long as our civilisation keeps trundling along generally forwards, then there is the possibility of a future where ethnicity is merely an interesting badge, not a uniform you can't take off. — David Mitchell

Remember: What Cupid gives, Cupid takes away. — David Mitchell

After the nuclear war, kids like them'll rule what's left. It'll be hell. — David Mitchell

If you've never been through it, you can't understand it, not really. Lucky you, I say. Control is about fear, see. If you're afraid of the reprisals, you don't say no, you don't fight back, you don't run away. Saying yes is how you survive. It becomes normal. Horrible, but normal. Horrible, because it's normal. Now, lucky you can say, 'Not standing up to him is giving him permission,' but if you've been fed this diet since the year dot, there is no standing up. Victims aren't cowards. Outsiders, like, they never have a clue how brave you have to be to carry on. — David Mitchell

Only I don't close my eyes these days, because it hurts too much when I open them. — David Mitchell

My role was to pulse at the edge of the universe of the faithful, alone in the darkness. An outrider. A herald. — David Mitchell

Fantasy. Lunacy.
All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities. — David Mitchell

The soul is a verb." He impales a lit candle on a spike. "Not a noun. — David Mitchell

Most cities are nouns, but New York is a verb. What might Beunas Yerbas be, I wonder?'
'A string of adjectives and conjunctions?'
'Or an expletive? — David Mitchell

Heresy is fissiparous, however. — David Mitchell

Don't worry, all is well. All is so perfectly, damnably well. — David Mitchell

Women, O, women! They'll find the baddest meanin' in your words & hold it up. — David Mitchell

Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible. — David Mitchell

Writing novels worth reading will bugger up your mind, jeopardize your relationships, and distend your life. — David Mitchell

And grade every simile and metaphor from one star to five, and remove any threes or below. It hurts when you operate, but afterwards you feel much better. — David Mitchell

Conduct your life in such a way that, when your train breaks down in the eve of your years, you have a warm, dry car driven by a loved one - or a hired one, it matters not - to take you home. — David Mitchell

Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late, but it's the first thing I think of when I wake, and the last thing I think of before I fall asleep, even if J. is in my bed. She should understand, the artist lives in two worlds. — David Mitchell

Do you ever think you might be a different species of human, knitted out of raw DNA in a laboratory like in The Island of Doctor Moreau, and then turned loose to see if you can pass yourself off as normal or not? — David Mitchell

A Muzak version of 'Imagine' comes on and John Lennon wakes up in his tomb, appalled. — David Mitchell

Nothing is more tiresome than being told what to admire, and having things pointed at with a stick.
-Robert Frobisher — David Mitchell

Better a soulless clone... than a souled roach. — David Mitchell

It's a very special talent that men have, to possess seeing eyes yet be so blind. — David Mitchell

Well, psychologists say there's a second umbilical cord, an invisible one, an emotional one, which ties you to your parents for the whole time you're a kid. Then, one day, you have a row with your mum if you're a girl, or your dad if you're a boy, and that argument cuts your second cord. Then, and only then, are you ready to go off into the big wide world and be an adult on your own terms. It's like a rite-of-passage thing. — David Mitchell

A dragonfly settles on a bulrush an inch from my nose. Its wings are like cellophane and Jonah says, "Its wings are like cellophane," and I say, "I was just thinking that," but Jonah says, "Just thinking what?" so maybe I just thought he'd said it. Valium rubs out speech marks and pops thought-bubbles. I've noticed it before. — David Mitchell

I've seen every single episode. I think it might be my favourite programme. I enjoy it enormously. I also think it's shit. — David Mitchell

She let him finish her sentences for her for so long that now he starts them too. — David Mitchell

I envied my uncritical, unthinking sisters. — David Mitchell

Mortality is inscribed in your cellular structure, and you say you're not ill? Look at the painting. Look at it." She nods towards The Adoration of the Magi. I obey. I always will. "Thirteen subjects, if you count them, like the Last Supper. Shepherds, the Magi, the relatives. Study their faces, one by one. Who believes this newborn manikin can one day conquer death? Who wants proof? Who suspects the Messiah is a false prophet? Who knows that he is in a painting, being watched? Who is watching you back? — David Mitchell

Dreams are shores where the ocean of spirit meets the land of matter. Dreams are beaches where the yet-to-be, the once-were, the will-never-be may walk awhile with the still are. — David Mitchell

Despair is as attractive as cold sores. — David Mitchell

Why do things happen at all? What is it that stops the world simply ... seizing up?"
... "Do you know?"
... "I don't know the answer, no. Sometimes I think it's the only question, and that all the other questions are tributaries that flow into it ... Might the answer be 'love'? — David Mitchell

The truth of a myth, your Honor, is not its words but its patterns. — David Mitchell

In the 1970s and 1980s there was so little decent fiction for young people, but we're now in a golden age that shows no sign of fading. Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Lemony Snicket are only three of the best known among a good number of equals. — David Mitchell

Truth is singular. Its 'versions' are mistruths. — David Mitchell

I have always preferred maps to books. They don't answer you back. Never throw a map away. — David Mitchell

Creation never ceased on the sixth evening, it occurs to the young man. Creation unfolds around us, despite us and through us at the speed of days and nights. And we call it love. — David Mitchell

Sawing the head off a thunder god with a rusty hacksaw is not easy when you are eleven years old. — David Mitchell

If I was the pope, I'd've made Mrs. de Roo a saint. On the spot. — David Mitchell

People're always buried facing west, so at the end of time when the Last Trumpet blows, all the dead people'll claw their way up and walk due west to the throne of Jesus to be judged ... Suicides, mind, get buried facing north. They won't be able to find Jesus 'cause dead people only walk in straight lines ... Isn't no god better than one who does that to people? — David Mitchell

Surely a program of incremental reforms, of cautious steps, is the wisest way to proceed? You show xtraordinary erudition for an eighth-stratum, Archivist. I wonder if you encountered this dictum first spoken by a twentieth-century statesman: "An abyss cannot be crossed in two steps." We — David Mitchell

Never too late. Shooting is prayer. And when civilisation shuts up shop, a gun'll be worth any number of university degrees. — David Mitchell

Do you know? He says. I feel I've known you for years, not ninety minutes. — David Mitchell