Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Such inbred, bovine torpor!”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

253. “If people praise you, you’re not walking your own path.”

— David Mitchell

254. “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

255. “Laughter is an anarchic blasphemy. Tyrants are wise to fear it.”

— David Mitchell

256. “The conflict between corporations and activists is that of narcolepsy versus remembrance. The corporations have money, power, and influence. Our weapon is public outrate.”

— David Mitchell

257. “Power is lost or won, never created or destroyed. Power is a visitor to, not a possession of, those it empowers.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

259. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

262. “Cynicism can blind one to subtler virtues.”

— David Mitchell

263. “Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies, an’ tho’ a cloud’s shape nor hue nor size don’t stay the same, it’s still a cloud an’ so is a soul. Who can say where the cloud’s blowed from or who the soul’ll be ‘morrow? Only Sonmi the east an’ the west an’ the compass an’ the atlas, yay, only the atlas o’ clouds.”

— David Mitchell

264. “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

265. “You said you could find an obscure recording for me by Robert Frobisher, Cloud Atlas Sextet.”

— David Mitchell

266. “Cowardice is nothing to do with it – suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching.”

— David Mitchell

267. “This, explained the angel, is hell. The people do not love each other. They only want to feed themselves.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

269. “Remember: What Cupid gives, Cupid takes away.”

— David Mitchell

270. “Thunder splits the rift where the Sun floods in.”

— David Mitchell

271. “Probably” is a word with an emergency ejector seat.”

— David Mitchell

272. “Us elderly are the modern lepers.”

— David Mitchell

273. “I put ten sugar cubes in my coffee. I drank it through my tongue, and my blood sang like the Archangel Gabriel as the sugar flooded in. That can’t be natural.”

— David Mitchell

274. “Time cannot permeate this sabbatical. We do not stay dead long.”

— David Mitchell

275. “A wise man does not step betwixt the beast and his meat.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

278. “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

279. “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

280. “Glass half empty, glass half full, glass too small?”

— David Mitchell

281. “But reality creeps in wherever you live, however pretty the flowers are, however blue the sky, however great the parties. The only people who actually live in dreams are people in comas.”

— David Mitchell

282. “Sunrise bright as a silver dollar.”

— David Mitchell

283. “It is a gift from your ancestors and a loan from your descendants.”

— David Mitchell

284. “Writing’s a pathology,” I say. “I’d pack it in tomorrow, if I could.”

— David Mitchell

285. “Okay, so she’s mad as a sack of ferrets. Only I don’t tell her so ’cause I’d like more of that green tea.”

— David Mitchell

286. “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

287. “A random sequence of seemingly unrelated events.”

— David Mitchell

288. “All the woe of the words “I am” seemed dissolved there, painlessly, peacefully. Hae-Joo announced, “The ocean.”

— David Mitchell

289. “Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or they don’t, will is pitted against will. “Admire me, for I am a metaphor.”

— David Mitchell

290. “What separates us from the beasts, apart from fire, laughter, depression and guilt about killing the odd beast, is our curiosity. We’ve advanced as a species because we’ve wanted to find things out, regardless of whether we thought it useful. We looked at the sky and wondered what was going on.”

— David Mitchell

291. “De wereld is al wankel genoeg.”

— David Mitchell

292. “Attaining immortality is easier than controlling its terms and conditions.”

— David Mitchell

293. “It’s a classy Victorian pub with brass fittings, upholstered chair backs, and NO SPITTING signs.”

— David Mitchell

294. “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

295. “All boundaries are conventions.”

— David Mitchell

296. “I managed to smile, thinking how Modesty is Vanity’s craftier stepbrother.”

— David Mitchell

297. “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

298. “London is a language. I guess all places are.”

— David Mitchell

299. “I was tired of flying. Tired of that life, of the screams, of the faces, of the fame. So I quit. Fame molds itself onto your face. Then it molds your face.”

— David Mitchell

300. “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