David Mitchell Quotes

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

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

Perhaps all human interaction is about wanting and getting.

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

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.

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.

The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak.

I love HBO productions, actually, like 'The Wire.'

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.

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.

I wonder how many years Suga has been carrying his curse around with him. I forget that other people in the world have broken parts too.

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

There are so many cities in every single city.

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

why human beings despise what is beautiful and good, and seek to destroy the things they need the most

Often I think boys don’t become men. Boys just get papier-mâchéd inside a man’s mask. Sometimes you can tell the boy is still in there.

Music’s a wood you walk through.

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

I rarely ever put my head above the rampart and see where this big lumbering behemoth called 'global literature' is going.

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

For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.

I can write pretty much anywhere.

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.

Historically, unfortunately, race seems to be the major division that humanity has imposed on itself, a way of subdividing into smaller groups.

A novelist needs to know his own strong points and weak points.

Do ants get headaches?

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

A life spent shaping a world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living.

A mountain you're plannin' on climbin' ain't the same as the one you ain't. It ain't so pretty.

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

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

Oh, bein' young ain't easy 'cos ev'rythin' you're puzzlin'n'anxin' you're puzzlin'n'anxin' it for the first time.

…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.

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

Science devises ever bloodier means of war until humanity's powers of destruction overcome our powers of creation and our civilisation drives itself to extinction.

Dreams are all I have ever truly owned.

Courage is the highest quality for a soldier, but technology is a fine substitute.

Writing is such a damn lonely sickness.

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

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

Lunatics are writers whose works write them.

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.

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.

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

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

What do I miss? Second-hand bookshops where I can find things I had no idea I wanted. AbeBooks helps, but it doesn't have that smell.

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.

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

Act', implores the Ghost of Future Regret. 'I shan't give you another chance'. [and so Jacob does] 'Damned fool,' groans the Demon of Present Regret. 'What have you done?

What is "poker"? A card game where abler liars take money off less able liars.