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

302. “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

303. “Hate smells of burnt dead fireworks.”

— David Mitchell

304. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

307. “De wereld is al wankel genoeg.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

311. “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

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

— David Mitchell

313. “All boundaries are conventions.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

316. “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

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

— David Mitchell

318. “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

319. “Despair is as attractive as cold sores.”

— David Mitchell

320. “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

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

— David Mitchell

322. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

327. “Every nowhere is a somewhere.”

— David Mitchell

328. “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

329. “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

330. “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

331. “The media – and not just The Washington Post – is where democracies conduct their civil wars.”

— David Mitchell

332. “The corporations have money, power, and influence. Our sole weapon is public outrage.”

— David Mitchell

333. “Experimentally, silently, I mouth I love you... No one hears, no one sees, but the tree falls in the forest just the same.”

— David Mitchell

334. “Rights are susceptible to subversion, as even granite is susceptible to erosion.”

— David Mitchell

335. “But Ed Brubeck’s a guy, like Vinny’s a guy, and guys are all sperm-guns.”

— David Mitchell

336. “Her professional conscience is a collar. I hold the leash.”

— David Mitchell

337. “A cloud of critics, of compilers, of commentators darkened the face of learning, and the decline of genius was soon followed by the corruption of taste.”

— David Mitchell

338. “Only a homeopath could believe that such a microscopic quantity of justice could have any beneficial effect.”

— David Mitchell

339. “Photographs make me forget if time is forwards or backwards. No, photographs make me wonder if there is a forwards or backwards.”

— David Mitchell

340. “My recent adventures have made me quite the philosopher, especially at night, when I hear naught but the stream grinding boulders into pebbles through an unhurried eternity.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

342. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

345. “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

346. “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

347. “Adverbs are cholesterol in the veins of prose.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

349. “Crazy people are hard work.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell