David Mitchell Quotes

The song instantly insisted it'd never existed.

I am, emphatically. Mental illness triggered by xperimental error.

As long as you can Houdini your way out of the Sisyphean constraints then originality happens.

Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides... I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life's voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldn't I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.

Lying's wrong, but when the world spins backwards, a small wrong may be a big right.

Gosh. The subjunctive is always the first to go.

Words are very powerful and can lead anyone reading them or hearing them, into contemplation and insight. How the mind follows suit is rarely palpable or expected. This impact is not a matter of metaphysical effects nor of an unexplainable phenomenon. It’s simply part of being human.

Men invented money Women invented mutual aid

Times are you say a person's b'liefs ain't true, they think you're sayin' their lifes ain't true an' their truth ain't true.

As many truths as men. Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent.

By each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.

I often lose myself in the Sudoku-like challenges of making a book work.

As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory.

Yay, Old'uns' Smart mastered sicks, miles, seeds an' made miracles ord'nary, but it din't master one thing, nay, a hunger in the hearts o' humans, yay, a hunger for more.

I'm not a great deep political thinker.

Why does any martyr cooperate with his judases?...We see a game beyond the endgame...As Seneca warned Nero: No matter how many of us you kill, you will never kill your successor.

How could I know a famished heart will eat its mind? Can kill its body?

Perhaps all human interaction is about wanting and getting.

If only,’ Shiroyama dreams, ‘human beings were not masks behind masks behind masks. If only this world was a clean board of lines and intersections. If only time was a sequence of considered moves and not a chaos of slippages and blunders.

Little girls are like old cats. If they don't like you nothing on Earth will make them pretend to.

Maybe then you comprehend, speaking one language only is a prison!

The world never stops unmaking what the world never stops making. But who says the world has to make sense?

Your turn has come to sift through the dreck of humanity for rare specks of originality

Women, O, women! They'll find the baddest meanin' in your words & hold it up.

Dead things show you what you’ll be too one day.

Don't bemoan your misspent life quite yet. Forgive me for flaunting my experience, but you have no conception of what a misspent life constitutes.

A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it.

Perpetual encagement endows any mirage of salvation with credibility.

Music’s a wood you walk through.

Eva. Every day I've climbed up the belfry chanting a lucky chant at one syllable per beat, "To-day-to-day-let-her-be-here-to-day-to-day.

The healthy can't understand the emptied, the broken.

I wonder if you encountered this dictum first spoken by a twentieth-century statesman: "An abyss cannot be crossed in two steps.

Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience.

Writing is probably one-fifth coming up with the stuff, and four-fifths self-editing again and again and again.

I am going to tell you a secret. Everything is about wanting. Everything. Things happen because of people wanting. Watch closely, and you’ll see what I mean.

One's ribs shouldn't be prison bars.

over 85% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

Humans live in a pit of cheating, exploiting, hurting, incarcerating. Every time, the species wastes some part of what it could be. This waste is poisonous.

You can maintain power over people, as long as you give them something. Rob a man of everything, and that man will no longer be in your power.

An idler and a sluggard are as different as a gourmand and a glutton.

Time is the speed at which the past decays.

This isn’t lust. Lust wants, does the obvious Love is greedier. Love wants round-the-clock care; protection; rings, vows, joint accounts; scented candles on birthdays; life insurance. Babies. Love’s a dictator.

Once any tyranny becomes accepted as ordinary, its victory is assured.

Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one's core.

Why ask a question whose answer would demand ten more questions?

For white men, to live is to own, or to try to own more, or to die trying to own more. Their appetites are astonishing! They own wardrobes, slaves, carriages, houses, warehouses, and ships. They own ports, cities, plantations, valleys, mountains, chains of islands. They own this world, its jungles, its skies, and its seas. Yet they complain that Dejima is a prison. They complain they are not free.

...there ain't no journey what don't change you some.

I believe death is only a door. One closes, and another opens. If I were to imagine heaven, I would imagine a door opening. And he would be waiting for me there.