Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “Music leaks out of the Walkman, and a saxophone from long ago circles in the air, so sad it could barely leave the ground.”

— David Mitchell

452. “People are obscenities.”

— David Mitchell

453. “Empty guns make me nervous.”

— David Mitchell

454. “Musicians may be walking asscracks or they may be God’s mouthpiece on Earth, but punctual they ain’t.”

— David Mitchell

455. “The book doesn’t give a damn about genre, it just is what it is.”

— David Mitchell

456. “There’s the blind, Mr. Grimaldi, there’s the willfully blind, and then there’s the soon to be retired.”

— David Mitchell

457. “He sifts the radio waves, but it’s all men singing like women and women singing like men...”

— David Mitchell

458. “How better to separate actions from any sense of their meaning than with dance? The global success of Gangnam Style has shown the way.”

— David Mitchell

459. “If you love and are loved, whatever you do affects others.”

— David Mitchell

460. “Glass half empty, glass half full, glass too small?”

— David Mitchell

461. “What if trying to avoid the future is what triggers it all?”

— David Mitchell

462. “A book can’t be a half-fantasy any more than a woman can be half pregnant.”

— David Mitchell

463. “Today’s the day I either change my life or I don’t.”

— David Mitchell

464. “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 just to carry on.”

— David Mitchell

465. “I watched the stars and thought of other lives.”

— David Mitchell

466. “Orito pictures the human mind that weaves disparate threads of belief, memory, and narrative into an entity whose common name is Self, and which sometimes calls itself Perception.”

— David Mitchell

467. “Your power stations, your cars, your creature comforts. Well, you lived too long. The bill’s due. Today.”

— David Mitchell

468. “The woman was sincere – bigots mostly are – but no less dangerous for that, and she shall be named and shamed.”

— David Mitchell

469. “Jasper de Zoet. A damn good name. A ‘J’ and a ‘Z.’ Nice high Scrabble score.”

— David Mitchell

470. “I wonder if “Anchorite” means “anchorman,” or if it’s a Kiwi-ism or a rifle club–ism. Cambridge is full of insiders’ words to keep outsiders out.”

— David Mitchell

471. “I come to my journal as a Catholick to a confessor.”

— David Mitchell

472. “True metamorphosis doesn’t come with flowcharts.”

— David Mitchell

473. “Holly slides off the chairlift like a gymnast, and I slide off like a sack of hammers.”

— David Mitchell

474. “All the supernatural yarns need a realist explanation and a supernatural one.”

— David Mitchell

475. “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

476. “That’s writing, I suppose – dozens of decisions about what’s in, what’s out, what goes with what, what’s clever but not honest, what’s so honest that it’s a truism, what’s meretricious – and all just to produce one short sketch.”

— David Mitchell

477. “It takes quite a leap of self-importance to decide: “I’m going to put a stop to that!”

— David Mitchell

478. “If we all just settle into small, mutually ignorant online support groups exchanging comforting half-truths, then civilisation is in for a rough ride. No one will know what is really going on, and working out what is really going on has, for most of history, been humankind’s main purpose. Losing that is a high price to pay for being able to order pizza without speaking to anyone.”

— David Mitchell

479. “I consider how you don’t get to choose whom you’re attracted to, you only get to wonder about it retrospectively.”

— David Mitchell

480. “It’s the edges of the maps that fascinate...”

— David Mitchell

481. “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

482. “I’d learn betrayals came in various shapes and sizes, but to betray someone’s dream is the unforgivable one.”

— David Mitchell

483. “This is how to control entire populations – don’t suppress news, but make it so dumb and dull that nobody has any interest in it.”

— David Mitchell

484. “Our will to power, our science, and those v. faculties that elevated us from apes, to savages, to modern man, are the same faculties that’ll snuff out Homo sapiens before this century is out!”

— David Mitchell

485. “Young mothers are the most vicious tribe in the world if you don’t fit in.”

— David Mitchell

486. “A brain constructs a model of reality. If that model isn’t too different from most people’s model, you’re labeled sane. If the model is different, you’re labeled a genius, a misfit, a visionary, or a nutcase. In extreme cases, you’re labeled a schizophrenic and locked up.”

— David Mitchell

487. “But this isn’t a ghost story: the ghost is in the background, where she has to be. If she was in the foreground she’d be a person.”

— David Mitchell

488. “The corporations have money, power, and influence. Our sole weapon is public outrage.”

— David Mitchell

489. “Leaving a picture lets you see the whole frame.”

— David Mitchell

490. “If you don’t want the fish, why do you catch them?” A few seconds pass. “For the quality of the conversation.”

— David Mitchell

491. “Why’s it okay to draw spaceships if you’re seven, but not okay to draw diabolical mazes?”

— David Mitchell

492. “One cannot cross the same river twice.”

— David Mitchell

493. “Why had Goose lied so? Why was he so determined no one.”

— David Mitchell

494. “When I’m in doubt – as I am now – I ask myself, ‘What would Carl Jung do?’ – and act accordingly.”

— David Mitchell

495. “Commuters sway like sides of beef and slump like corpses: red-eyed office slaves plugged into Discmans; their podgier selves in their forties buried in the Evening Standard; and nearly retired versions gazing over West London wondering where their lives went. I am the System you have to beat, clacks the carriage. I am the System you have to beat.”

— David Mitchell

496. “Even as I write, my former premises are being turned into a Hard Rock Cafe for homesick Americans.”

— David Mitchell

497. “Bad things happen to realists.”

— David Mitchell

498. “The dumbstruck crowd parted as the murderer made his way to the nibblies table.”

— David Mitchell

499. “The empowered may serve justice, remodel the Earth, transform lush nations into smoking battlefields, and bring down skyscrapers, but power itself is amoral.”

— David Mitchell

500. “Soul is a verb.”

— David Mitchell