David Mitchell Quotes

I really wish they hadn't made the set out of asbestos.

But you have read Madame Bovary?' (I'd never heard of her books.) 'No.

Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman.

I've become a less brave traveller since I became a dad, but in the past I was more foolhardy than brave.

Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.

There's a link between bigotry and bad spelling.

Me, I want to bloody kick this moronic bloody world in the bloody teeth over and over till it bloody understands that not hurting people is ten bloody thousand times more bloody important than being right.

The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak.

Nothing is as eloquent as nothing.

False modesty can be worse than arrogance.

The uncreated and the dead exist solely in our actual and virtual pasts.

What is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

Folks with most to complain about seldom complain most.

I believe there is another world waiting for us. A better world. And I'll be waiting for you there.

The better organized the state, the duller its humanity.

The body is the outermost layer of the mind.

Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' conscience; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding the mirror." I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves. Mephi replied, "History suggests, not until they are made to.

Words are what you fight with but what you fight about is whether or not you're afraid of them.

Implausible truth can serve one better than plausible fiction

I elbowed my way into the grubby café, bought a pie that tasted of shoe polish and a pot of tea with cork crumbs floating in it, and eavesdropped on a pair of Shetland pony breeders. Despondency makes one hanker after lives one never led. 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.

Sometimes, comics will make the observation that it's not jokes that are funny, it's characters that are funny. And isn't that true! That's why I always kill jokes. I'm terrible at them, because I get the joke right, but I can't get the character right, and it just goes down like a lead balloon.

Do," said Louisa finally, "whatever you can't not do.

Go to hell, Willy, our souls eat poetry, but one has seven deadly sins to feed!

If you’re in your life, chance. Viewed from the outside, like a book you’re reading, it’s fate all the way.

Probably in a parallel universe not far from here, I'm working for Nintendo.

I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.

Don't remember summer even saying goodbye.

Human hunger birthed the Civlize, but human hunger killed it too.

Japanese food makes me feel particularly good.

The truth of a myth...is not in its words but its patterns.

History admits no rules; only outcomes.

Two people who are a little bit deluded in each other's favour. That's what love is, isn't it?

- This isn't an interrogation or a trail. Your version of the truth is the only thing that matters. -Truth is singular. It's 'versions' are mistruths.

I remain thankful to God for all his mercies.

If, by happiness, you mean the absence of adversity I and all fabricants are the happiest stratum in corpocracy as genomicists insist. However, if happiness means the conquest of adversity or a sense of purpose, or the xercise of one’s will to power, then of all Nea So Copros’s slaves we surely are the most miserable.

Better a soulless clone... than a souled roach.

Leaves turned to soil beneath my feet. Thus it is, trees eat themselves.

Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms around the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.

...it’s not just the person who fills a house, it’s their I’ll be back later!s, their toothbrushes and unused hats and coats, their belongingnesses.

I understand now that boundaries between noise and sound are conventions. All boundaries are conventions, waiting to be transcended. One may transcend any convention if only one can first conceive of doing so.

She has to lose her pre-Copernican view of a universe revolving around herself.

To fool a judge, feign fascination, but to bamboozle the whole court, feign boredom.

Italians give their city sexes, and they all agree that the sex for a particular city is quite correct, but none of them can explain why. I love that. London's middle-aged and male, respectably married but secretly gay.

The earth's a door if you press your ear against it.

Anticipating the end of the world is humanity's oldest passtime

It'll be all right." Julia's gentleness makes it worse. "In the end, Jace." "It doesn't feel very all right." "That's because it's not the end.

If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth and claw, if we believe divers races & creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass.

Teachers're always using that "in your own words." I hate that. Authors knit their sentences tight. It's their job. Why make us unpick them, just to put it back together more shonkily? How're you s'posed to say Kapellmeister if you can't say Kapellmeister?