Top 500 David Mitchell Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Time is the speed at which the past decays.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

404. “I’m not in the Scouts any more,’ I remind her. Mr Moody our scoutmaster told me to get lost, so I did, and it took the Snowdonia mountain rescue service two days to find my shelter.”

— David Mitchell

405. “But the idea that you can no longer trust your mind, that’s just about the most frightening thing there is. When you mess around with proportion or symmetry, or when doubt is injected into your perception of the laws of physics, your mind ceases to be a refuge. Your mind is no longer a safe house.”

— David Mitchell

406. “I understood that one’s environment is a key to one’s identity, but that my environment, Papa Song’s, was a key I had lost.”

— David Mitchell

407. “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

408. “You vowed never to trust any fabricant. You knew that Abolitionism was as dangerous and insidious a dogma as Unionism. You supported the resultant Homeland Laws dictated by the Beloved Chairman, wholeheartedly.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

410. “Crispin Hershey!” Lady Suze holds up both hands as if I’m the sun god Ra. “Your event was totes amazeballs! As they say.”

— David Mitchell

411. “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

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

— David Mitchell

413. “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

414. “People are icebergs, with just a bit you can see and loads you can’t.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

418. “A big fat zoo of snorers is snoring in all different rhythms.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

422. “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

423. “Time needs time to be measurable.”

— David Mitchell

424. “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

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

427. “The wheel of seasons is broken, says the spring pattern this autumn day, and so am I.”

— David Mitchell

428. “Soviet imperialism’s as bad as American capitalism.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

430. “I’d always worried but kissing’s not so tricky. Your lips know what to do, just like sea anemones know what to do.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

433. “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

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

— David Mitchell

435. “Preacher, of all the world’s races, our love- or rather our rapacity-for treasure, gold, spices, and dominion, oh, most of all, sweet dominion, is the keenest, the hungriest, the most unscrupulous! This rapacity, yes, powers our Progress; for ends infernal of divine I know not. Nor do you know, sir. Nor do I overly care. I feel only gratitude that my maker cast me on the winning side.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

437. “Dappled sunshine shivers.”

— David Mitchell

438. “As if Art is the What, not the How!”

— David Mitchell

439. “I looked gloomily into the murky lake at the bottom of my teacup, and.”

— David Mitchell

440. “The wisdom of skin is underappreciated.”

— David Mitchell

441. “The corporations have money, power and influence. 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. First, you need scrutiny; second, widespread awareness; only when this reaches a critical mass does public outrage explode into being. Any stage may be sabotaged.”

— David Mitchell

442. “It’s never a good idea for politicians to get involved in comedy.”

— David Mitchell

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

— David Mitchell

444. “Books tended not to switch their stories whenever it suited them.”

— David Mitchell

445. “To list and name people... is to subjugate them.”

— David Mitchell

446. “The world runs on strangers coping.”

— David Mitchell

447. “My curiosity is dying, I told Professor Mephi one pleasant day, during a seminar on Thomas Paine. I remember the sounds of a baseball game drifting thru his open window. My mentor said we had to identify the source of this malady, and urgently. I said something about reading not being knowledge, about knowledge without xperience being food without sustenance. “You need to get out more,” remarked the professor.”

— David Mitchell

448. “Or else rip out the odd pages and leave me the even.”

— David Mitchell

449. “The days when I had that kind of spondulics at my beck and call are gone, gone, gone! Our house is mortgaged, twice over!”

— David Mitchell

450. “The rectum of Wybo Gerritszoon releases a hot fart of horror.”

— David Mitchell