Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 5 of 10

201. “I think it’s natural for youth to be drawn to newness: The world is still new for them.”

— David Mitchell

202. “Birdsong foamed in the hour-before-dawn garden.”

— David Mitchell

203. “One’s ribs shouldn’t be prison bars.”

— David Mitchell

204. “But love’s not just the drug; it’s also the dealer. Love wants love in return, am I right, Olly? Like drugs, the highs look divine, and I envy the users. But when the side effects kick in – jealousy, the rages, grief, I think, Count me out. Elizabethans equated romantic love with insanity. Buddhists view it as a brat throwing a tantrum at the picnic of the calm mind.”

— David Mitchell

205. “I still haven’t quite got used to eating live fish.”

— David Mitchell

206. “When watching the news, it’s so easy to forget what most of us are like: pleasant, polite, socially shy. We don’t want rows, we want a quiet life. We feel inadequate because we don’t protest and argue more – we don’t stand up for ourselves. And, in feeling that, we forget that the sort of people who do stand up for themselves are cut from the same cloth as the sort of people you have to stand up to.”

— David Mitchell

207. “For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.”

— David Mitchell

208. “I think the story is the most ancient form of human entertainment.”

— David Mitchell

209. “What women want is still what it’s always been: either you or, more likely, not you.”

— David Mitchell

210. “Apostrophes, however, I love with all my heart. I support the correctly used apostrophe with that kind of fierce emotional investment in an irrelevance that most people reserve for football.”

— David Mitchell

211. “Marriage is an anchor, lads. Stops you drifting onto rocks, but stops you voyaging as well.”

— David Mitchell

212. “I have always preferred maps to books. They don’t answer you back.”

— David Mitchell

213. “Prejudice is permafrost. Did.”

— David Mitchell

214. “For She’s a Squishy Marshmallow.”

— David Mitchell

215. “Humans live in a pit of cheating, exploiting, hurting, incarcerating. Every time, the species wastes some part of what it could be. This waste is poisonous.”

— David Mitchell

216. “I pitched my voice for Dirty Harry, but it was more Lisping Baggins.”

— David Mitchell

217. “Blame its user, blame its maker, but don’t blame the gun.”

— David Mitchell

218. “The color of monotony is blue. Christmas.”

— David Mitchell

219. “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

220. “Green is made of yellow and blue, nothing else, but when you look at green, where’ve the yellow and the blue gone? Somehow this is to do with Moran’s dad. Somehow this is to do with everyone and everything.”

— David Mitchell

221. “Our level of expectation is crucial to our enjoyment of food, wine, holidays, plays, films and TV shows. We flatter ourselves that we’re objective but our judgments are clouded by our hopes, by whether something was better or worse than we’d anticipated.”

— David Mitchell

222. “Don’t worry, all is well. All is so perfectly, damnably well.”

— David Mitchell

223. “A true suicide is a paced, disciplined certainty. People pontificate, “Suicide is selfishness.”

— David Mitchell

224. “Coffee’s the elixir of life.”

— David Mitchell

225. “I know my saying that will annoy some people, but that’s OK because they’re the very people I take most pleasure in annoying. So if you’re thinking about getting annoyed, you might want to consider not giving me the satisfaction and agree with me instead.”

— David Mitchell

226. “An abyss cannot be crossed in two steps.”

— David Mitchell

227. “The secret of happiness is to ignore your reflection in mirrors once you’re over forty.”

— David Mitchell

228. “Belief is both prize and battlefield, within the mind and in the mind’s mirror, the world. If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation, and bestiality, such a humanity is surely brought into being.”

— David Mitchell

229. “That’s why I’m so proud to live here. London, more than any other city on earth, is the new Rome – so much so that Rome is in some ways just the old London.”

— David Mitchell

230. “Nowadays not even the villains smoke. Now smoking really is an expression of the rebel spirit – it’s virtually sodding illegal! Yet what are we without our addictions? Insipid. Flavorless.”

— David Mitchell

231. “Time cannot permeate this sabbatical. We do not stay dead long. Once my Luger lets me go, my birth, next time around, will be upon me in a heartbeat. Thirteen years from now we’ll meet again at Gresham, ten years later I’ll be back in this same room, holding this same gun, composing this same letter, my resolution as perfect as my many-headed sextet.”

— David Mitchell

232. “I heard a miaow nearby and looked down to see a moon-grey cat melting out of the shadows.”

— David Mitchell

233. “Wet catkins fur the twigs of a willow.”

— David Mitchell

234. “Anything is true if enough people believe it is.”

— David Mitchell

235. “You groan and shake your head, Sixsmith, I know, but you smile too, which is why I love you.”

— David Mitchell

236. “Coupling is frenzy; decoupling is farce.”

— David Mitchell

237. “Does death always make you so verbose?” Luisa’s voice trembles. “What do you mean ‘always’?”

— David Mitchell

238. “To those upon the menu, the sauce is no concern.”

— David Mitchell

239. “If we could read the script of the future, we’d never turn the page.”

— David Mitchell

240. “My heart’s a clubbed baby seal.”

— David Mitchell

241. “We’re in touch with the zeitgeist, but are too down-to-earth to be impressed. Who doesn’t want to come across like that?”

— David Mitchell

242. “Love is a blurring of pronouns. Love is subject and object. The difference between its presence and its absence is the difference between life and death.”

— David Mitchell

243. “Every generation must lose its innocence, must see the brightly painted nursery wall smashed away by the wrecking ball of betrayal to reveal a blighted landscape. For our predecessors, it was the Somme, the Great Depression, the Holocaust or Vietnam; for my generation, it was The Phantom Menace.”

— David Mitchell

244. “Don’t let ’em say I killed myself for love, Sixsmith, that would be too ridiculous. Was infatuated by Eva Crommelynck for a blink of an eye, but we both know in our hearts who is the sole love of my short, bright life.”

— David Mitchell

245. “With a story, as with a well-chosen gift, we’re happiest when surprised by something we didn’t know we wanted.”

— David Mitchell

246. “One of the reasons I’d been attracted to showbusiness in the first place was that I thought, most of my experience so far having been of the theatre, that it was a profession that ring-fenced the lie-in. I didn’t mind the idea of working in the evenings, maybe of rehearsing in the afternoons, but mornings, I felt, should be the preserve of sleep, tea and paracetamol. So the realisation that television, the medium I most wanted to work in, required such punishing early starts was a bitter blow.”

— David Mitchell

247. “The cat looks at her and meows, Feed me, for I am beautiful. Orito.”

— David Mitchell

248. “Suffering is the one promise life always keeps.”

— David Mitchell

249. “There’s something fishy about Google’s motto, “Don’t Be Evil.” I’m not saying it’s controversial but it makes you think, “Why bring that up? Why have you suddenly put the subject of being evil on the agenda?” It’s suspicious in the same way as Ukip constantly pointing out how racist they’re not –.”

— David Mitchell

250. “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