Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “I’m a novelist, that’s how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

204. “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

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

— David Mitchell

Featured in: Strong Quotes

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

— David Mitchell

207. “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

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

— David Mitchell

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— David Mitchell

210. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

221. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

225. “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

226. “It is a cycle as old as tribalism. In the beginning there is ignorance. Ignorance engenders fear. Fear engenders hatred, and hatred engenders violence. Violence breeds further violence until the only law is whatever is willed by the most powerful.”

— David Mitchell

227. “Once I knew a stable-boy,” says Francis Bacon. “He used to say, ‘Grief is the bill of love, fallen due.’ I can’t recall his face or even name, but I remember that line. Isn’t it odd, what sticks?”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

229. “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

230. “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

231. “Psychological complexity, character development, the killer line to end a scene, villains blotched with virtue, heroic characters speckled with villainy, foreshadow and backflash, artful misdirection.”

— David Mitchell

232. “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

233. “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

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

— David Mitchell

235. “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

236. “Coffee’s the elixir of life.”

— David Mitchell

237. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

240. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

243. “And don’t knock nepotism, Cheeseman; my well-connected uncles all agree, nepotism made this country what it is today.”

— David Mitchell

244. “I lied, yes, but that doesn’t make me a liar. Lying’s wrong, but when the world spins backwards, small wrong may be a big right.”

— David Mitchell

245. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

248. “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

249. “Robert Frobisher mentions a comet-shaped birthmark between his shoulder blade and collarbone.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell