Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “Be that as it may, future ages will still be corpocratic ones. Corpocracy isn’t just another political system that will come and go – corpocracy is the natural order, in harmony with human nature.”

— David Mitchell

452. “Preacher, of all the world’s races, our love- or rather our rapacity-for treasure, gold, spices, and dominion, oh, most of all, sweet dominion, is the keenest, the hungriest, the most unscrupulous! This rapacity, yes, powers our Progress; for ends infernal of divine I know not. Nor do you know, sir. Nor do I overly care. I feel only gratitude that my maker cast me on the winning side.”

— David Mitchell

453. “The glances musicians exchange, when music is effortless, that was what he wanted from Milly, that intimacy.”

— David Mitchell

454. “Time needs time to be measurable.”

— David Mitchell

455. “To have relied on a man to stay alive is a bond closer than blood.”

— David Mitchell

456. “Forty minutes, times sixty seconds, that’s twenty-four thousand seconds to go.”

— David Mitchell

457. “Soul is a verb.”

— David Mitchell

458. “For white men, to live is to own, or to try to own more, or to die trying to own more. Their appetites are astonishing! They own wardrobes, slaves, carriages, houses, warehouses, and ships. They own ports, cities, plantations, valleys, mountains, chains of islands. They own this world, its jungles, its skies, and its seas. Yet they complain that Dejima is a prison. They complain they are not free.”

— David Mitchell

459. “Fear hardens caution, but boredom erodes it.”

— David Mitchell

460. “Mental maps. Maps with edges. And for Auden, for so many of us, it’s the edges of the maps that fascinate...”

— David Mitchell

461. “Cats seem too transdimensional to get hit by traffic, but it happens all the time.”

— David Mitchell

462. “And she looks like a girl unwrapping an expensive present she knew she was getting.”

— David Mitchell

463. “Are you what you believe yourself to be?”

— David Mitchell

464. “Adverbs are cholesterol in the veins of prose. Halve your adverbs and your prose pumps twice as well.” Pens scratch. “Oh, and beware of the verb ‘seem’; it’s a textual mumble. 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

465. “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

466. “Her only friends on the estate were books, and books can talk but do not listen.”

— David Mitchell

467. “Life’s more science-fictiony by the day.”

— David Mitchell

468. “He wondered if identity is drawn not in indelible ink, but by a light 5H pencil.”

— David Mitchell

469. “Girls fascinate in different ways. Try ’em one day. Tapped on the pane, and asked in French if she’d save my life by falling in love with me.”

— David Mitchell

470. “The world runs on strangers coping.”

— David Mitchell

471. “The oblong of light is back and motes of dust swirl in the sunshine slating down the wall of books. Golden pollen.”

— David Mitchell

472. “Oh, the greenness of green: back under the canopy, our ford slowed by a dew garden between squattened buildings. Feathery, fronded, moss drenched, green.”

— David Mitchell

473. “Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides... I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life’s voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn’t I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.”

— David Mitchell

474. “Crispin Hershey!” Lady Suze holds up both hands as if I’m the sun god Ra. “Your event was totes amazeballs! As they say.”

— David Mitchell

475. “An unkind describer might refer to her face as like a party nobody’s turned up to.”

— David Mitchell

476. “Heresy is fissiparous, however.”

— David Mitchell

477. “People buy such bollocks at museums. They don’t know what else to do once they’re there.”

— David Mitchell

478. “They need shinier myths that will never be soiled by becoming true.”

— David Mitchell

479. “The pollenless trees were genomed to repel bugs and birds; the stagnant air reeked of insecticide.”

— David Mitchell

480. “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

481. “Writing is a forest of faint paths, of dead-ends, hidden pits, unresolved chords, words that won’t rhyme. You can be lost in there for hours. Days, even.”

— David Mitchell

482. “I looked gloomily into the murky lake at the bottom of my teacup, and.”

— David Mitchell

483. “My in-ear Babelfish provides synopses of the passages rather than a running translation, but now and then the interpreter confesses, “I’m sorry, but I have no idea what he just said. I’m not sure the author knew, either.”

— David Mitchell

484. “The blue jay threads a flight-path through stripes of brightness and stripes of mossy dark.”

— David Mitchell

485. “If only,’ Shiroyama dreams, ’human beings were not masks behind masks behind masks. If only this world was a clean board of lines and intersections. If only time was a sequence of considered moves and not a chaos of slippages and blunders.”

— David Mitchell

486. “Power is crack cocaine for your ego and battery acid for your soul.”

— David Mitchell

487. “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

488. “Here’s the truth: Who is spared love is spared grief.”

— David Mitchell

489. “Why’s it okay to draw spaceships if you’re seven, but not okay to draw diabolical mazes? Who decides that spending money on Space Invaders is fine, but if you buy a calculator with loads of symbols you’re asking to be picked on? Why’s it okay to listen to the Top 40 on Radio 1 but not okay to listen to stations in other languages?”

— David Mitchell

490. “I’m not in the Scouts any more,’ I remind her. Mr Moody our scoutmaster told me to get lost, so I did, and it took the Snowdonia mountain rescue service two days to find my shelter.”

— David Mitchell

491. “We – by whom I mean anyone over sixty – commit two offenses just by existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drug barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide.”

— David Mitchell

492. “I consider how you don’t get to choose whom you’re attracted to, you only get to wonder about it, retrospectively. Racial differences I’ve always found to have an aphrodisiac effect on me, but class difference is sexuality’s Berlin Wall.”

— David Mitchell

493. “Mrs. Todds my English teacher gives an automatic F if anyone ever writes “I woke up and it was all a dream” at the end of a story. She says it violates the deal between reader and writer, that it’s a cop-out, it’s the Boy Who Cried Wolf.”

— David Mitchell

494. “For one voyage to begin, another voyage must come to an end, sort of.”

— David Mitchell

495. “Or else rip out the odd pages and leave me the even.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

497. “Nurse Noakes passed by and my fellow inmates all silent, like songbirds under the shadow of a hawk.”

— David Mitchell

498. “It’s never a good idea for politicians to get involved in comedy.”

— David Mitchell

499. “Books tended not to switch their stories whenever it suited them.”

— David Mitchell

500. “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