Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

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

— David Mitchell

304. “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

305. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

309. “Jealous and sweet, this music was, sobbing and gorgeous, muddy and crystal. But if the right words existed the music wouldn’t need to.”

— David Mitchell

310. “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

311. “Hate smells of burnt dead fireworks.”

— David Mitchell

312. “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

313. “People are masks, with masks under those masks, and masks under those, and down you go.”

— David Mitchell

314. “I light up, fumigate my alveolar sacs and think dark thoughts.”

— David Mitchell

315. “The impossible is negotiable. What is possible is malleable.”

— David Mitchell

316. “De wereld is al wankel genoeg.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

318. “Those there English gerrrrunts are trampling o’er ma God-gi’en rrraights! Theeve used me an’ ma pals morst direly an’ we’re inneed of a wee assistance.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

322. “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

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

— David Mitchell

324. “All boundaries are conventions.”

— David Mitchell

325. “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

326. “When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist. I never imagined how hungry I’d be one day to look inside it.”

— David Mitchell

327. “How the consumers seethed to buy, buy, buy! Purebloods, it seemed, were a sponge of demand that sucked goods and services from every vendor, dinery, bar, shop, and nook.”

— David Mitchell

328. “Corpocracy is built on slavery, whether or not the word is sanctioned.”

— David Mitchell

329. “But it’s the feeling of love that we love, not the person.”

— David Mitchell

330. “What surer sign is there that the creative aquifers are dry than a writer creating a writer-character?”

— David Mitchell

331. “Dappled sunshine shivers.”

— David Mitchell

332. “The glances musicians exchange, when music is effortless, that was what he wanted from Milly, that intimacy.”

— David Mitchell

333. “Trees, their incremental gymnastics and noisy silence, are another wonder of Outside to me.”

— David Mitchell

334. “I walked along the pebbly beach. Plastic buoys. A sea coconut, shaped like a woman’s loins. Junk, washed up with the driftwood. Cans, bottles, rubber gloves, detergent containers. I heard grunts and squeals from under a peeling boat, never to float again. In the distance a shadow lit a fire.”

— David Mitchell

335. “Eavesdropping’s sort of thrilling ’cause you learn what people really think, but eavesdropping makes you miserable for exactly the same reason.”

— David Mitchell

336. “Prayer may be a placebo for the disease of helplessness, but placebos can make you feel better.”

— David Mitchell

337. “Sit down a beat or two. Hold out your hands. Look.”

— David Mitchell

338. “I consider how you don’t get to choose whom you’re attracted to, you only get to wonder about it, retrospectively. Racial differences I’ve always found to have an aphrodisiac effect on me, but class difference is sexuality’s Berlin Wall. Certainly, I can’t read Holly Sykes as well as I can girls from my own incometax tribe, but you never know. God made the whole Earth in six days, and I’m in Switzerland for nine or ten.”

— David Mitchell

339. “Bury the hatchet. Hatchets don’t work on ghosts. They cannot hear you. You only end up hatcheting yourself.”

— David Mitchell

340. “A whoah game it was, said Catkin, but I din’t want to know its rules nor endin’.”

— David Mitchell

341. “So who’s expired in an ending flat and inane quite beyond belief now?”

— David Mitchell

342. “When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist.”

— David Mitchell

343. “The lounge is empty of bodies but full of debris: wineglasses, ashtrays, food wrappers, and a pair of silk boxer shorts over the Boer War rifle.”

— David Mitchell

344. “I asked if I could ever learn to play like that. “No,” he told me, “because” -I’ll always remember this- “you haven’t lived my life and the blues is a language you can’t lie in.” But if I wanted enough, he said, then one day I’d learn to play like me.”

— David Mitchell

345. “Dr. Egret gives me the creeps. Never met a quack whom I didn’t half-suspect of plotting to do me in as expensively as he could contrive.”

— David Mitchell

346. “Ignorance of the Other engenders fear; fear engenders hatred; hatred engenders violence; violence engenders further violence until the only “right,” the only law, are whatever is willed by the most powerful.”

— David Mitchell

347. “We – by whom I mean anyone over sixty – commit two offenses just by existing. One is Lack of Velocity. We drive too slowly, walk too slowly, talk too slowly. The world will do business with dictators, perverts, and drug barons of all stripes, but being slowed down it cannot abide. Our second offence is being Everyman’s memento mori. The world can only get comfy in shiny-eyed denial if we are out of sight.”

— David Mitchell

348. “The nation-state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions.”

— David Mitchell

349. “The wisdom of skin is underappreciated.”

— David Mitchell

350. “Snow is bruised lilac in half-lite: such pure solace. You speak like an aesthete sometimes, Sonmi. Perhaps those deprived of beauty perceive it most instinctively. So.”

— David Mitchell