Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Corpocracy is built on slavery, whether or not the word is sanctioned.”

— David Mitchell

352. “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

353. “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

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

— David Mitchell

355. “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

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

— David Mitchell

357. “Gardener made a bonfire of fallen leaves – just came in from it. The heat on one’s face and hands, the sad smoke, the crackling and wheezing fire. Reminds me of the groundsman’s hut at Gresham. Anyway, got a gorgeous passage from the fire – percussion for crackling, alto bassoon for the wood, and a restless flute for the flames.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

359. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “It takes quite a leap of self-importance to decide: “I’m going to put a stop to that!”

— David Mitchell

367. “I consider how you don’t get to choose whom you’re attracted to, you only get to wonder about it retrospectively.”

— David Mitchell

368. “The wisdom of skin is underappreciated.”

— David Mitchell

369. “The devil, Sixsmith, is in the pronouns.”

— David Mitchell

370. “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

371. “Small talk, thinks Elf, is Polyfilla you fill cracks with so you don’t have to watch them widening.”

— David Mitchell

372. “Miguel tries to look jokey-penitent, but misses and looks like a man in white jeans who underestimates a spot of flatulence.”

— David Mitchell

373. “No one else has lived this life.”

— David Mitchell

374. “I wish, he thinks, spoken words could be captured and kept in a locket.”

— David Mitchell

375. “Betty says, ‘Frank, hey, Frank, lend this guy seventy dollars!”

— David Mitchell

376. “A young woman emerges from the next-door party and leans over the neighboring balcony.”

— David Mitchell

377. “Foolproof depends on the size of the fool.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

380. “How improbable must a coincidence be before it’s a sign?”

— David Mitchell

381. “Conduct your life in such a way that, when your train breaks down in the eve of your years, you have a warm, dry car driven by a loved one – or a hired one, it matters not – to take you home.”

— David Mitchell

382. “His skin’s so tanned he could be Turkish or something.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

384. “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

385. “This time I whisper it, at about the violin’s volume: “I love you.” No one hears, no one sees, but the tree falls in the forest just the same.”

— David Mitchell

386. “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

387. “Jasper de Zoet. A damn good name. A ‘J’ and a ‘Z.’ Nice high Scrabble score.”

— David Mitchell

388. “If reason worked on alcoholics, there’d be no alcoholics.”

— David Mitchell

389. “When I’m in doubt – as I am now – I ask myself, ‘What would Carl Jung do?’ – and act accordingly.”

— David Mitchell

390. “Bad things happen to realists.”

— David Mitchell

391. “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

392. “The empowered may serve justice, remodel the Earth, transform lush nations into smoking battlefields, and bring down skyscrapers, but power itself is amoral.”

— David Mitchell

393. “Oh, eerie’n’so beautsome’n’blue she was, my soul was achin’.”

— David Mitchell

394. “Books’ll be back,” Esther-in-Unalaq predicts. “Wait till the power grids start failing in the 2030s and the datavats get erased. It’s not far away. The future looks a lot like the past.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

396. “The media’s obsession with conflict means that we’re confronted with it so relentlessly that we’ve stopped questioning why it’s there in the first place.”

— David Mitchell

397. “Sometimes John had recorded new compositions, or lines from his new poems. Sometimes he’d just record a busy night in The Green Man. Sometimes sheep, seals, skylarks, the wind turbine. If Liam were home there would be some Liam. The summer fair. The Fastnet Race. I would unfold my map of Clear Island. Those tapes prised the lid off homesickness and rattled out the contents, but always at the bottom was solace.”

— David Mitchell

398. “Crazy people are hard work.”

— David Mitchell

399. “European music is passionately savage, broken by long silences.”

— David Mitchell

400. “Empty guns make me nervous.”

— David Mitchell