Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Adverbs are cholesterol in the veins of prose.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

353. “Crazy people are hard work.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

360. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

363. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

368. “Joy Division throbbed in the background.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

370. “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

371. “Do either of you know clock patience? You have to add cards up to fifteen?”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

373. “Our sole weapon is public outrage. Outrage blocked the Yuccan Dam, Ousted Nixon, and in part, terminated the monstrosities in Vietnam. but outrage is unwieldy to manufacture and handle.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

375. “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

376. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

380. “Dappled sunshine shivers.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

383. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

387. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

394. “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

395. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

398. “Only the inanimate can be so alive.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell