Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “A stunt kite writes on the blue with its pink tail.”

— David Mitchell

302. “Hobbies are for pleasure, but rituals keep you going.”

— David Mitchell

303. “Every nowhere is a somewhere.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

305. “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

306. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

311. “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

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

— David Mitchell

313. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

316. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

319. “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

320. “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

321. “Hate smells of burnt dead fireworks.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

324. “Fantasy. Lunacy. All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilites.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

327. “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

328. “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

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

— David Mitchell

330. “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

331. “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

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

— David Mitchell

333. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

336. “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

337. “If academic endeavour had always been vetted in advance for practicality, we wouldn’t have the aeroplane or the iPhone, just a better mammoth trap.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

342. “Fatalism’s a weak antidepressant, but there’s nothing stronger at Dr. Kumar’s.”

— David Mitchell

343. “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

344. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

347. “The mystery o’ fishing’s this,’ said Dean’s dad, ‘what’s the hook, who’s got the rod, what’s the maggot, what’s the fish?’ ‘Why’s that a mystery, Dad?’ ‘Yer’ll understand when yer older.’ ‘But ain’t it obvious what’s what?’ ‘It changes, son. In a heartbeat.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

349. “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

350. “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