David Mitchell Quotes

You only value something if you know it’ll end.

~ David Mitchell

When a woman is interested in you, she’ll let you know; if not, there’s no aftershave, gift, or line you can spin to make her change her mind.

~ David Mitchell

Only I don't close my eyes these days, because it hurts too much when I open them.

~ David Mitchell

But this isn't a ghost story: the ghost is in the background, where she has to be. If she was in the foreground she'd be a person.

~ David Mitchell

Lunatics are writers whose works write them, Bat. Not all lunatics are writers, Mrs. Rey-believe me. But most writers are lunatics, Bat-believe me. The human world is made up of stories, not people.

~ David Mitchell

When you write it, don't write it in the manner of a spooky story. Don't try to give an explanation. Just say that I don't know what to make of it, just write it like I tell it, so the reader can make up his own mind.

~ David Mitchell

So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?

~ David Mitchell

Taro taught me that people respect spirit, but even cowards don't respect cowards.

~ David Mitchell

A writer flirts with schizophrenia, nurtures synesthesia, and embraces obsessive-compulsive disorder. Your art feeds on you, your soul, and, yes, to a degree, your sanity. Writing novels worth reading will bugger up your mind, jeopardize your relationships, and distend your life. You have been warned.

~ David Mitchell

The novelist is more like a pregnant woman who delivers her own child unaided. A messy procedure, with lots of groaning.

~ David Mitchell

You groan and shake your head, Sixsmith, I know, but you smile too, which is why I love you.

~ David Mitchell

Holly rubs her temples. “Are we talking ... vampires?”Arkady groans. “On, the V-word! Here it comes again.

~ David Mitchell

Such narrative arcs make good movies but shitty existences.

~ David Mitchell

But thought has no eyelids to close or ears to block...

~ David Mitchell

Patience's design flaw became obvious for the first time in my life: the outcome is decided not during the course of play but when the cards are shuffled, before the game even begins. How pointless is that?

~ David Mitchell

What sparks wars? The will to power, the backbone of human nature. The threat of violence, the fear of violence, or actual violence, is the instrument of this dreadful will. You can see the will to power in bedrooms, kitchens, factories, unions and the borders of states. Listen to this and remember it. The nation state is merely human nature inflated to monstrous proportions. QED, nations are entities whose laws are written by violence. Thus it ever was, so ever shall it be.

~ David Mitchell

I watched the stars and thought of other lives.

~ David Mitchell

Survival often demands our courage.

~ David Mitchell

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.

~ David Mitchell

I wonder who had the first computer dream, where, and when? I wonder if computers ever dream of humans.

~ David Mitchell

Is peace of mind the co-workability of your laws?

~ David Mitchell

Snarling an oath from an Icelandic saga, I reclaimed my place at the head of the queue. Oy! yelled a punk rocker, with studs in his cranium. There's a fackin' q

~ David Mitchell

After years of working with missionaries, I am tempted to conclude that their endeavors merely prolong a dying race's agonies for ten or twenty years. The merciful plowman shoots a trusty horse grown too old for service. As philanthropists, might it not be our duty to likewise ameliorate the savages' sufferings by hastening their extinction? Think of your Red Indians, Adam, think on the treaties you Americans abrogate & renege on, time & time & time again. More humane, surely & more honest, just to knock the savages on the head & get it over with?

~ David Mitchell

& everywhere he observed that casual brutality lighter races show the darker.

~ David Mitchell

This, explained the angel, is hell. The people do not love each other. They only want to feed themselves.

~ David Mitchell

The downside is the fear.The fear of something happening to her, the pressure of there being two bodies in the world that I want to keep from harm and only being able to watchfully inhabit one of them. I wonder if you know what I mean.I hope you do for your sake.

~ David Mitchell

Answering the question 'How would you like to smell?' by saying 'I'd rather I didn't' is also no longer acceptable. It's not playing the game. Men are expected to put some cash into the cosmetic pot too - it's seen as almost un-feminist not to. What a uniquely capitalist response to that gender inequality: women have been forced by convention for generations - millennia - to spend money on expensive clothes and agonising shoes, to daub themselves with reality-concealing slap, to smell expensively inhuman, to self-mutilate in pursuit of eternal youth; and this, quite rightly, has come to be deemed unfair. But how do we end this hell? We make men do it too. Well done everyone.

~ David Mitchell

Poems are lenses, mirrors, and X-ray machines.

~ David Mitchell

But to what end? Some... future revolution? It can never succeed.As Seneca warned Nero: No matter how many of us you kill, you will never kill your successor.

~ David Mitchell

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.

~ David Mitchell

A sprinkle of last-minute despair gives a soul an agreeably earthy aftertaste.

~ David Mitchell

Surgeons are a singular brotherhood, Adam. To us, people aren't sacred beings crafted in the Almighty's image, no, people are joints of meat; diseased, leathery meat, yes, but meat ready for the skewer & the spit. He mimicked my usual voice, very well. 'But why *me*, Henry, are we not friends?' Well, Adam, even friends are made out of meat.

~ David Mitchell

... 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.

~ David Mitchell

A single night is stuffed with minutes, but they leak out, one by one.

~ David Mitchell

Secrets affect you more than you’d think. You lie to keep them hidden. You steer talk away from them. You worry someone’ll discover yours and tell the world. You think you are in charge of the secret, but isn’t it the secret who’s actually using you?

~ David Mitchell

Young mothers are the most vicious tribe in the world if you don't fit in.

~ David Mitchell

The world's a headmaster who works on your faults. I don't mean in a mystical or Jesus way. More how you'll keep tripping over a hidden step, over and over, till you finally understand: Watch out for that step! Everything that's wrong with us, if we're too selfish or too Yessir, Nosir, Three bags full sir or too anything, that's a hidden step. Either you suffer the consequences of not noticing your fault forever or, one day, you do notice it, and fix it. Joke is, once you get it into your brain about that hidden step and think, Hey, life isn't such a shithouse after all again, then BUMP! Down you go, a whole new flight of hidden steps.There are always more.

~ David Mitchell

This isn’t lust. Lust wants, does the obvious, and pads back into the forest. 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.

~ David Mitchell

...if you bare your arse to a vengeful unicorn, the number of possible outcomes dwindles to one.

~ David Mitchell

On bad days you wonder, ‘Why not just back off from the war and lead a quiet metalife?

~ David Mitchell