Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Maybe then you comprehend, speaking one language only is a prison!”

— David Mitchell

52. “Writing is such a damn lonely sickness.”

— David Mitchell

53. “She was widely read enough to appreciate my literary wit but not so widely read that she knew my sources. I like that in a woman.”

— David Mitchell

54. “I pass through many Me’s in the course of my day, each one selfish with his time. The Lying-in-Bed me and the Enjoying-the-Hot-Shower Me are particularly selfish. The Late Me loathes the pair of them.”

— David Mitchell

55. “Many children are natural fantasists, I think, perhaps because their imaginations have yet to be clobbered into submission by experience.”

— David Mitchell

56. “I can’t bear living in this huge beautiful world and not try to imitate it as best I can.”

— David Mitchell

57. “How could I know a famished heart will eat its mind? Can kill its body?”

— David Mitchell

58. “When I think about it, I’m happily bewildered that people will preorder my books They’ll preorder me. What a lucky guy!”

— David Mitchell

59. “The human world is made of stories, not people. The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed.”

— David Mitchell

60. “The music provokes a sharp longing the music soothes.”

— David Mitchell

61. “Mediocrity is fine if you accept it.”

— David Mitchell

62. “Nothing has changed, except everything.”

— David Mitchell

63. “In an increasingly virtual world, feelings are as valid as facts.”

— David Mitchell

64. “Grief is the bill of love, fallen due.”

— David Mitchell

65. “When a woman is interested in you, she’ll let you know; if not, there’s no aftershave, gift, or line you can spin to make her change her mind.”

— David Mitchell

66. “Don’t mess with the fairies.”

— David Mitchell

67. “Every Adam needs an Eve.”

— David Mitchell

68. “The truth of a myth, your Honor, is not its words but its patterns.”

— David Mitchell

69. “While much of her true name lay beyond my knowledge of the Noongar language, as the minutes passed I understood that her name was also a history of her people, a sort of Bayeux Tapestry that bound myth with loves, births, deaths; hunts, battles, journeys; droughts, fires, storms; and names of every host within whose body Moombaki had sojourned.”

— David Mitchell

70. “Trees’re always a relief, after people.”

— David Mitchell

71. “Freedom!- is the fatuous jingle of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is.”

— David Mitchell

72. “So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?”

— David Mitchell

73. “Why ask a question whose answer would demand ten more questions?”

— David Mitchell

74. “How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn’t, the wolves and blizzards would be at one’s throat all the sooner.”

— David Mitchell

75. “A weapon men use against women is the refusal to take them seriously.”

— David Mitchell

76. “False modesty can be worse than arrogance.”

— David Mitchell

77. “We are only what we know, and I wished to be so much more than I was, sorely.”

— David Mitchell

78. “We looked at each other for the last time; nothing is as eloquent as nothing.”

— David Mitchell

79. “Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don’t remember summer even saying goodbye.”

— David Mitchell

80. “Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience.”

— David Mitchell

81. “Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction.”

— David Mitchell

82. “Time is what stops history happening at once; time is the speed at which the past disappears.”

— David Mitchell

83. “Human beings need to watch out for reasonless niceness too. It’s never reasonless and its reason’s not usually nice.”

— David Mitchell

84. “Evil is in the eye of the beholder.”

— David Mitchell

85. “Japanese food makes me feel particularly good.”

— David Mitchell

86. “If swans weren’t real, myths’d make them up.”

— David Mitchell

87. “True knowledge without xperience is food without sustenance.”

— David Mitchell

88. “Leaves turned to soil beneath my feet. Thus it is, trees eat themselves.”

— David Mitchell

89. “Go to hell, Willy, our souls eat poetry, but one has seven deadly sins to feed!”

— David Mitchell

90. “Italians give their city sexes, and they all agree that the sex for a particular city is quite correct, but none of them can explain why. I love that. London’s middle-aged and male, respectably married but secretly gay.”

— David Mitchell

91. “These jokes the world plays, they’re not funny at all.”

— David Mitchell

92. “Don’t remember summer even saying goodbye.”

— David Mitchell

93. “There’s a link between bigotry and bad spelling.”

— David Mitchell

94. “One fine day a predatory world shall consume itself.”

— David Mitchell

95. “Who was blowing on the nape of my neck.”

— David Mitchell

96. “Perpetual encagement endows any mirage of salvation with credibility.”

— David Mitchell

97. “If war’s first victim is truth, its second is clerical efficiency.”

— David Mitchell

98. “Don’t bemoan your misspent life quite yet. Forgive me for flaunting my experience, but you have no conception of what a misspent life constitutes.”

— David Mitchell

99. “Whoever opined “Money can’t buy you happiness” obviously had far too much of the stuff.”

— David Mitchell

100. “I’m from a time and place where bigheadedness was a really savage crime, and you’d get cut down for it by your peers and parents.”

— David Mitchell