David Mitchell Quotes

Whoever dies with the most stuff wins.

The human world is made of stories, not people.

We are only what we know, and I wished to be so much more than I was, sorely.

But no, we cross, crisscross, and recross our old tracks like figure skaters.

When insolvent, pack minimally, with a valise tough enough to be thrown onto a London pavement from a first- or second-floor window. Insist on hotel rooms no higher.

We looked at each other for the last time; nothing is as eloquent as nothing.

I think words operate like musical notes that the eyeball hears.

Oh, diplomacy ... it mops up war's spillages; legitimizes its outcomes; gives the strong state the means to impose its will on a weaker one, while saving its fleets and battalions for weightier opponents.

Good moods’re as fragile as eggs...Bad moods’re as fragile as bricks.

A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.

Faith shall save your Soul from Death. Without Faith, Death is a drowning, the end of ends, and what sane man wouldn't fear that? But with Faith, Death is nothing worse than the end of the voyage we call life, and the beginning of an eternal voyage in a company of our Loved Ones, with griefs and woes smoothed out, and under the capacity of our Creator.

... but it is attitude, not years, that condemns one to the ranks of the Undead, or else proffers salvation. In the domain of the young there dwells many an Undead soul. They rush about so, their inner putrefaction is concealed for a few decades, that is all.

Wars are never cured, they just go into remission for a few years.

I...asked why purebloods despised me so. He replied, 'What if the difference between social strata stem not from genomics or inherent xcellence or even dollars, but merely differences in knowledge? Would this not mean the whole Pyramid is built on shifting sands?... fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' consciences; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding up the mirror

The act of memory is an act of ghostwriting.

The human world is made of stories, not people. The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed

I feel like something important has happened to me. Is this possible?

I think it's natural for youth to be drawn to newness: The world is still new for them.

Our lives are not our own. We are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.

Why fight the 'natural' (oh, weaselly word!) order of things? Why? Because of this--one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.

I still haven't quite got used to eating live fish.

Pain is strong, aye - but friends' eyes, more strong." I told him that he knows next to nothing about me & I know nothing about him. He jabbed at his eyes & jabbed at mine, as if that single gesture were ample explanation.

Lunatics are writers whose works write them.

clocks in disagreement are worse than no clock at all.

As long as our civilisation keeps trundling along generally forwards, then there is the possibility of a future where ethnicity is merely an interesting badge, not a uniform you can't take off.

True knowledge without xperience is food without sustenance

People b'lief the world is built so an tellin em it ain't so caves the roofs on their heads'n'maybe yours.

Ive never had cocaine. I work in showbusiness and no one has ever offered me cocaine. Can you believe that? It makes me worry Im not always the life and soul of the party that I feel like in my head.

When I think about it, I'm happily bewildered that people will preorder my books They'll preorder me. What a lucky guy!

The soul is a verb." He impales a lit candle on a spike. "Not a noun.

Right, my phone. When these things first appeared, they were so cool. Only when it was too late did people realize they are as cool as electronic tags on remand prisoners.

The rain's innumerable hooves spatter on the streets and roofs.

I have always preferred maps to books. They don't answer you back.

I'm not from a milieu where high-register language or philosophical ideas were welcome.

It's true that stammerers can become more adept at sentence construction.

I'm from a time and place where bigheadedness was a really savage crime, and you'd get cut down for it by your peers and parents.

How lazily "xperts" dismiss what they fail to understand!

…and there, in the background, the sky’s sediment had sunk to a place where all the woe of the words ‘I am’ dissolved into blue peace. He said it. ‘The ocean.

One cannot pass by without thinking of the density of men in the ground.

You say you're 'depressed' - all i see is resilience. You are allowed to feel messed up and inside out. It doesn't mean you're defective - it just means you're human.

In the 1970s and 1980s there was so little decent fiction for young people, but we're now in a golden age that shows no sign of fading. Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Lemony Snicket are only three of the best known among a good number of equals.

This world, he thinks, contains just one masterpiece, and that is itself.

The her that lived in her looked out through her eyes, through my eyes, and at the me that lives in me.

Under the Enrichment Laws, consumers have to spend a fixed quota of dollars each month, depending on their strata. Hoarding is an anti-corpocratic crime.

Power. What do we mean? 'The ability to determine another man's luck.' ...how is it that some men attain mastery over others while the vast majority live and die as minions, as livestock? The answer is a holy trinity. First: God-given gifts of charisma. Second: the discipline to nurture these gifts to maturity, for though humanity's topsoil is fertile with talent, only one seed in ten thousand will ever flower -- for want of discipline. Third: the will to power.

I recently bought a cat, but took it back a day later because our personalities clashed.

Have you noticed," said John, "how countries call theirs 'sovereign nuclear deterrents,' but call the other countries' ones 'weapons of mass destruction'?

Creation never ceased on the sixth evening, it occurs to the young man. Creation unfolds around us, despite us and through us at the speed of days and nights. And we call it love.