Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Courage is the highest quality for a soldier, but technology is a fine substitute.”

— David Mitchell

152. “I think words operate like musical notes that the eyeball hears.”

— David Mitchell

153. “As long as you can Houdini your way out of the Sisyphean constraints then originality happens.”

— David Mitchell

154. “Historically, unfortunately, race seems to be the major division that humanity has imposed on itself, a way of subdividing into smaller groups.”

— David Mitchell

155. “A true suicide is a paced, disciplined certainty. People pontificate, ‘Suicide is Selfishness.’ Career churchmen go a step further and call it a cowardly assault on the living... Cowardice has nothing to do with it – suicide takes considerable courage. No, what’s selfish i to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends and enemies a bit of soul-searching.”

— David Mitchell

156. “Mother used to say escape is never further than the nearest book.”

— David Mitchell

157. “Little girls are like old cats. If they don’t like you nothing on Earth will make them pretend to.”

— David Mitchell

158. “Hate eats the hater the way ogres eat little boys.”

— David Mitchell

159. “The human world is made of stories, not people.”

— David Mitchell

160. “I often lose myself in the Sudoku-like challenges of making a book work.”

— David Mitchell

161. “This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself.”

— David Mitchell

162. “If your words’re true, they’re armed.”

— David Mitchell

163. “Folks with most to complain about seldom complain most.”

— David Mitchell

164. “I think we think in terms of stories.”

— David Mitchell

165. “Loneliness is an integral part of travelling. I used to think it was the downside to travelling, but now I realise it is a necessary educative part of it to be embraced.”

— David Mitchell

166. “Gosh. The subjunctive is always the first to go.”

— David Mitchell

167. “Life is a terminal illness.”

— David Mitchell

168. “One cannot pass by without thinking of the density of men in the ground.”

— David Mitchell

169. “Wars are never cured, they just go into remission for a few years.”

— David Mitchell

170. “Integrity is a bugger, it really is. Lying can get you into difficulties, but to really wind up in the crappers try telling nothing but the truth.”

— David Mitchell

171. “She has to lose her pre-Copernican view of a universe revolving around herself.”

— David Mitchell

172. “The downside is the fear of something happening to her. The pressure of there being two bodies in the world that I want to keep from harm and only being able to watchfully inhabit one of them. I wonder if you know what I mean. I hope that you do, for your sake. It’s a worry I’ll have to learn to live with because I’m definitely out of wishes.”

— David Mitchell

173. “When insolvent, pack minimally, with a valise tough enough to be thrown onto a London pavement from a first- or second-floor window. Insist on hotel rooms no higher.”

— David Mitchell

174. “The rain’s innumerable hooves spatter on the streets and roofs.”

— David Mitchell

175. “British Airways: “No one is actually going to save the environment, so you might as well enjoy it while it lasts.”

— David Mitchell

176. “I really wish they hadn’t made the set out of asbestos.”

— David Mitchell

177. “I can write pretty much anywhere.”

— David Mitchell

178. “So we surrender to stupidity, do we?” Freedom of speech is sacrificed at the altar of manufactured rage.”

— David Mitchell

179. “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

180. “Right, my phone. When these things first appeared, they were so cool. Only when it was too late did people realize they are as cool as electronic tags on remand prisoners.”

— David Mitchell

181. “Words are what you fight with but what you fight about is whether or not you’re afraid of them.”

— David Mitchell

182. “Lunatics are writers whose works write them.”

— David Mitchell

183. “The mind has a mind of its own. It shows us pictures. Pictures of the past and the might-one-day-be. This mind’s mind exerts its own will, too, and has its own voice.”

— David Mitchell

184. “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

185. “The uncreated and the dead exist solely in our actual and virtual pasts.”

— David Mitchell

186. “Human hunger birthed the Civlize, but human hunger killed it too.”

— David Mitchell

187. “I added ‘writers’ to my list of people not to trust. They make everything up.”

— David Mitchell

188. “How lazily “xperts” dismiss what they fail to understand!”

— David Mitchell

189. “A dragonfly arrives and leaves like a change of mind.”

— David Mitchell

190. “I quote Seneca’s warning to Nero: No matter how many of us you kill, you will never kill your successor.”

— David Mitchell

191. “Write something every single day, even if it’s just three lines. And it doesn’t matter if it’s any good – just write something every day.”

— David Mitchell

192. “Dead things show you what you’ll be too one day.”

— David Mitchell

193. “I feel like something important has happened to meIs this possible?”

— David Mitchell

194. “I’ve become a less brave traveller since I became a dad, but in the past I was more foolhardy than brave.”

— David Mitchell

195. “A novelist needs to know his own strong points and weak points.”

— David Mitchell

196. “This society doesn’t work without booze – our parties aren’t good enough, our conversations aren’t sufficiently interesting, nor is our self-confidence high enough to sustain our interactions without alcohol. It’s everywhere, lubricating everything.”

— David Mitchell

197. “I’m a novelist, that’s how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.”

— David Mitchell

198. “Brainchild” is an odd word. You hear it a lot in explanatory voiceovers and I suppose I was trying to join in, but I don’t really like it. I’m not keen on the idea that my brain could have a child. Would it be made of brain – a child, made of grey brain, like a squelchy zombie? As metaphors for inspiration go, I prefer the lightbulb.”

— David Mitchell

199. “The song instantly insisted it’d never existed.”

— David Mitchell

200. “Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable haemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed.”

— David Mitchell