David Mitchell Quotes

120 Sourced Quotes

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

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

David Mitchell
To fool a judge, feign fascination, but to bamboozle the whole court, feign boredom.

David Mitchell
History admits no rules, only outcomes. What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts. What precipitates acts? Belief.

David Mitchell
Perhaps the best answer is that the writer that I am has been shaped by the stammering kid that I was, and that although my stammer didn't make me write, it did, in part, inform and influence the writer I became. It's true that stammerers can become more adept at sentence construction. Synonyms aren't always neatly interchangeable. Sometimes choosing word B over word A requires you to construct a different sentence to house it—and quickly, too, before your listener smells the stammering rat.

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

David Mitchell
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.

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

David Mitchell
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.

David Mitchell
Right now I'm working on a book set in the thirty years on either side of 2010, but I shouldn't give too many details or the next thing you know it's on Wikipedia and if I change my mind and decide to recast King Lear in a pond of frogs and toads I'll just give a hardworking Wikipedian an extra headache.

David Mitchell
People are obscenities. Would rather be music than be a mass of tubes squeezing semisolids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it'll no longer function.

David Mitchell
I added 'writers' to my list of people not to trust. They make everything up.

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

David Mitchell
List'n, savages an Civ'lizeds ain't divvied by tribes or b'liefs or mountain ranges, nay, ev'ry human is both, yay. Old Uns'd got the Smart o' gods but the savagery o' jackals, an' that's what tripped the Fall.

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

David Mitchell
Always, it is the poor people who pay. And always, it is the poor people's women who pay the most.

David Mitchell
This rapacity, yes, powers, our Progress; for ends infernal or divine I know not. Nor do you know, sir. Nor do I overly care. I feel only gratitude that my Maker cast me on the winning side.

David Mitchell
How lazily "xperts" [sic] dismiss what they fail to understand.

David Mitchell
Another war is always coming, Robert. They are never properly extinguished. What sparks war? 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… 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
"Your version of the truth is the only one that matters."
"Truth is singular. Its 'versions' are mistruths."

David Mitchell
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.

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

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

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

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

David Mitchell
Now I'm a spent firework; but at least I've been a firework.

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

David Mitchell
She was widely read enough to appreciate my literary wit but not so widely read that she knew my sources. I like that in a woman.

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

David Mitchell