Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

207. “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

208. “Prejudice is permafrost. Did.”

— David Mitchell

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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

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

— David Mitchell

218. “Coffee’s the elixir of life.”

— David Mitchell

219. “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

220. “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

221. “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

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

— David Mitchell

223. “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

224. “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

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

— David Mitchell

226. “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

227. “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

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

— David Mitchell

229. “Such inbred, bovine torpor!”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

233. “A Highlander spoke softly: “Aye, laddie. We’ll nort let ye doone.”

— David Mitchell

234. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

237. “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

238. “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

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

— David Mitchell

240. “Laboring types surrounded me with bad teeth, parrot voices, and unfounded optimism.”

— David Mitchell

241. “I wonder if you encountered this dictum first spoken by a twentieth-century statesman: “An abyss cannot be crossed in two steps.”

— David Mitchell

242. “Because her laughter spurts through a blow-hole in the top of her head and sprays all over the morning. Because a man like me has no business with this substance ‘beauty’, yet here she is, in these soundproofed chambers of my heart.”

— David Mitchell

243. “Do you think Britain is a great country? I do, basically. It’s embarrassing to admit it. And it feels un-British to admit it, except for the fact that it’s embarrassing, which is a very British sensation. Embarrassment is one of our strongest emotions.”

— David Mitchell

244. “All boundaries are conventions.”

— David Mitchell

245. “The lie that happiness is about borrowing money you haven’t got to buy crap you don’t need,” says Ian. “The lie that we live in a democratic state. And the most weaselly lie of all, that there is no class war.”

— David Mitchell

246. “A stunt kite writes on the blue with its pink tail.”

— David Mitchell

247. “Us elderly are the modern lepers.”

— David Mitchell

248. “The sacred is a fine hiding place for the profane.”

— David Mitchell

249. “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

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

— David Mitchell