David Mitchell Quotes

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

Japanese food makes me feel particularly good.

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.

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

maybe the meaning of life lies in looking for it

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

Folks with most to complain about seldom complain most.

The learnin' mind is the livin' mind, Meronym said, an any sort o'Smart is truesome Smart, old Smart or new high Smart or low.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Human beings need to watch out for reasonless niceness too. It's never reasonless and its reason's not usually nice.

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

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

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

The mind abhors a vacancy & is wont to people it with phantoms.

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

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

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

Probably" is a word with an emergency ejector seat.

If your words're true, they're armed.

Who was blowing on the nape of my neck?

We are both busy people, so let's cut the small talk.

Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president's pen or a vainglorious general's sword.

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.

The music provokes a sharp longing the music soothes.

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

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

Men invented money Women invented mutual aid

The weak are meat the strong do eat.

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

I think we think in terms of stories.

Write something every single day, even if it's just three lines. And it doesn't matter if it's any good - just write something every day.

These jokes the world plays, they're not funny at all.

War's an auction where whoever can pay the most in damage and still be standing wins.

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

If war's first victim is truth, its second is clerical efficiency.

Nothing is as eloquent as nothing.

The mind has a mind of its own. It shows us pictures. Pictures of the past and the might-one-day-be. This mind's mind exerts its own will, too, and has its own voice.

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

Hate eats the hater the way ogres eat little boys.

I think the story is the most ancient form of human entertainment.

History admits no rules; only outcomes.

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

I'm not a great deep political thinker.

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.

War may be an auction for countries. For soldiers it's a lottery.

One fine day a predatory world shall consume itself.