Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “It’s the edges of the maps that fascinate...”

— David Mitchell

302. “However, corpocracy was emerging and social strata was demarked, based on dollars and, curiously, the quantity of melanin in one’s skin.”

— David Mitchell

303. “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

304. “Truth has this habit of changing after the fact, don’t you find?”

— David Mitchell

305. “All boundaries are conventions.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

307. “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

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

— David Mitchell

309. “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

310. “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

311. “Wrong turns teach us the right way.”

— David Mitchell

312. “Marmite!’ Never has a product more successfully concealed the truth of its mediocrity merely by conceding the fact that some people find it disgusting.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

315. “Time is the speed at which the past decays.”

— David Mitchell

316. “Every nowhere is a somewhere.”

— David Mitchell

317. “People talk about the Endarkenment like our ancestors talked about the Black Death, as if it’s an act of God. But we summoned it, with every tank of oil we burned our way through. My generation were diners stuffing ourselves senseless at the Restaurant of the Earth’s Riches knowing – while denying – that we’d be doing a runner and leaving our grandchildren a tab that can never be paid.”

— David Mitchell

318. “It’s vital to our understanding of a complex world, and to our intellectual dexterity, to be able to hold two different concepts in our heads at once without assuming that they’re mutually exclusive.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

320. “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

321. “Leave Ueno Station through the park entrance, go past the concert hall and museums, skirt around the fountain, and you come to a sort of tree garden. Homeless people live here, in tents made of sky-blue plastic sheeting and wooden poles. The best tents even have doors.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

324. “A history program on BBC2 that afternoon showed old footage shot in Ypres in 1919. That hellish mockery of a once fair town was my own soul.”

— David Mitchell

325. “Up the hill, sheep bleat, oblivious to human empires rising and falling.”

— David Mitchell

326. “A book can’t be a half-fantasy any more than a woman can be half pregnant.”

— David Mitchell

327. “Yet the way men live is so far removed from the way they ought to live that anyone who abandons what ‘is’ for what ‘should be’ pursues his downfall rather than his preservation;.”

— David Mitchell

328. “One cannot cross the same river twice.”

— David Mitchell

329. “Even as I write, my former premises are being turned into a Hard Rock Cafe for homesick Americans.”

— David Mitchell

330. “What man ain’t the honestest cove in his own eyes?” Grote’s round face is a bronze moon in the dark. “’Tain’t good intentions what paves the road to hell: it’s self-justifyin’s.”

— David Mitchell

331. “All defectors have a complex relationship with truth.”

— David Mitchell

332. “Crazy people are hard work.”

— David Mitchell

333. “Did you not detect the hairline cracks in the plot? Such.”

— David Mitchell

334. “My spine still works. That’s always useful.”

— David Mitchell

335. “There is no God but the one we dream up.”

— David Mitchell

336. “I would agree with your statement that many of my protagonists are outsiders. I wonder if we all are, and even people who don’t think they are, and they’re just better at masking it. When we shut our bedroom door at night, however well-integrated we think we are with the rest of society, maybe there’s something illusory about that...”

— David Mitchell

337. “Life goes much more smoothly when everyone’s saying sorry. It’s the second most important social lubricant and, unlike the first, it doesn’t damage your liver.”

— David Mitchell

338. “You know, having the roof over one’s head dependent upon the good offices of an employer is a loathsome way to live. Christ only knows how the serving classes stand it.”

— David Mitchell

339. “Echoes of Scriabin’s White Mass, Stravinsky’s lost footprints, chromatics of the more lunar Debussy, but truth is I don’t know where it came from.”

— David Mitchell

340. “Love is the anesthetic applied by Nature to extract babies.”

— David Mitchell

341. “Young mothers are the most vicious tribe in the world if you don’t fit in.”

— David Mitchell

342. “Then the three of us hug, and if I could choose on moment of my life to sit inside of for the rest of eternity... it’d be now, no question.”

— David Mitchell

343. “All the woe of the words ‘I am’ seemed dissolved there, painlessly, peacefully.”

— David Mitchell

344. “I wonder what love feels like on the inside because externally it turns you into the King of Tit Mountain.”

— David Mitchell

345. “Listening’s reading if you close your eyes. Music’s a wood you walk through.”

— David Mitchell

346. “At certain rare moments, a library is a kind of mind.”

— David Mitchell

347. “Joy Division throbbed in the background.”

— David Mitchell

348. “Remember that a sincere apology never diminishes the apologizer.”

— David Mitchell

349. “No more tatterdemalion a renegado I ever beheld, but Mr. Evans swore the quadroon, Barnabas, was “the fleetest sheepdog who ever ran upon two legs.”

— David Mitchell

350. “Each square light, thinks Elf, is a life as big as mine.”

— David Mitchell