David Mitchell quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by David Mitchell

David Mitchell Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from David Mitchell on Wise Famous Quotes.

Persuasion is not about force; it's about showing a person a door, and making him or her desperate to open it.

Nothing more costly than item that has no price.

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

Sex may be the antidote to death but it offers life everlasting only to the species, not the individual.

...books may speak, but they do not listen.

Dogs are much crueler than BAFTAs

Alain-Fournier is

This "Not Today" attitude of yours is a cancer. Cancer of the character. It stunts your growth.

Humor is the ovum of dissent,

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

Beyond the Indian hamlet, upon a forlorn strand, I happened on a trail of recent footprints.

You can't be a part-time Richard Dawkins.

Cats seem too transdimensional to get hit by traffic, but it happens all the time.

after a couple of months, a well-ordered life tastes like a flat, nonalcoholic lager.

Perfume counters in department stores, Holly Deblin smells of, the middle of July, and cinnamon Tic Tacs.

If consumers found fulfillment at any meaningful level, she extemporized, corpocracy would be finished.

Heresy is fissiparous, however.

All boundaries are conventions.

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

A cow of awkward pause mooed.

Faust tends not to have happy endings.

How improbable must a coincidence be before it's a sign?

One can spot a fellow musician in any context, even amongst policemen. The craziest-eyed, unruliest-haired one, either hungry-skinny or jovial-portly.

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

My heart's a clubbed baby seal.

The wisdom of skin is underappreciated.

Matter is thought, and thought is matter. Nothing exists that cannot be synthesized.

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

Embrace your enemy," the elders urged, "to prevent him striking you." ("Embrace your enemy," Henry quipped, "to feel his dagger tickle your kidneys.")

What happens to all the seconds tipped into the bin of the past?

that's like Herod calling Thatcher a bit insensitive

Revolting' was the last word I ever spoke as someone who'd never kissed a girl.

I could pop with all the fear, irritation, and love.

You said you envied your uncritical, unthinking sisters.
That's not quite the same as wishing to be one

The thought of covering her in anything is Byronically diverting.

She let him finish her sentences for her for so long that now he starts them too.

In racy Victorian novels, beware of young widows.

If the affluent cannot afford hope, you cannot expect the destitute to pay for desperation.

So you're a sort of archivist for the future,

So how does it feel? is the reasonable question you hear a lot when your book completes the long ascent from production purgatory to movieplex.

You ask a starved man," Gerritszoon says, "to drink to a glutton.

The First Rule of Parenting states that you never wake a peacefully sleeping child.

All the supernatural yarns need a realist explanation and a supernatural one.

The most malicious god is the god of the counted chicken.

His skin was blotched as a dying banana.

The world unmakes stuff faster than people can make it.

Hell is hell because, there, evil passes unremarked upon.

Eavesdropping's sort of thrilling 'cause you learn what people really think, but eavesdropping makes you miserable for exactly the same reason.

Travel far enough, you meet yourself.

I can't blame them. I would have stared at me, too.

Photos're better than nothing, but things're better than photos 'cause the things themselves were part of what was there.

Ah, Klaas! Dear Klaas reverted to compost many years ago.

Bagpipes and electric guitars usually end in tears

At dawn the waves looked like mountain ranges tipped with gold as sunbeams slanted low under burgundy clouds.

I wish, he thinks, spoken words could be captured and kept in a locket.

Once you've been initiated into the Elderly, the world doesn't want you back.

ever written. I went to bed with it and read

I'm not sorry it stopped. [on Lady Gaga's "Poker Face"]

If swans weren't real, myths'd make them up.

Lying's wrong, but when the world spins backwards, a small wrong may be a big right.

Yay, when it came to faces, pretty lies was better'n scabbin' true

This is peace, if you think about it--machine-gun nests being used as picnic tables.

It's a very special talent that men have, to possess seeing eyes yet be so blind.

Love is the anesthetic applied by Nature to extract babies.

Nonfiction that smells like fiction is neither.

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

If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, 'When you're ready'.

All rising suns set.

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

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

On my laptop, I have written "This Machine Kills Neocapitalism"!

No one else has lived this life.

Aoife, in her dreams, makes a noise like a friendless harmonica.

Did you not detect the hairline cracks in the plot? Such

We had run out of infinity.

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

The best way to get out of debt is not to seek to get out of debt, but to seek to create wealth

Perhaps all human interaction is about wanting and getting.

Beg pardon? I detected large deposits of vanity. Vanity is the softest of bedrocks to sink shafts into.

I'm about to tell Jonah about the safari Dad's going to take me on, but Mrs. Marconi says talking's like ping-pong: you take turns.

All revolutions are the sheerest fantasy until they happen; then they become historical inevitabilities.

A volley of hailstones began abruptly, filled the woods with a frenzied percussion & ended on the sudden.

'Y' is about the weakest letter of all. 'Y' can't make up its mind if it's a vowel or a consonant, can it?

The minutes jog up the down escalator.

A Titus Andronicus catalog of threats beat at the door. They haunt my nightmares still.

There no such thing as something! Why? Because everything's already turning into something else!

She murmurs, "You only value something if you know it'll end." N

Evil is in the eye of the beholder.

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

Mum said I'd learn betrayals came in various shapes and sizes, but to betray someone's dream is the unforgivable one.

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

I lost my balance when the train pulled away, but a human crumple zone buffered my fall. We stayed like that, half fallen. Diagonal People.

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

Every nowhere is somewhere[...]

The colorblind get by just fine not knowing blue from purple.

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

And if you'd swap your metalife for a bone clock's snatched, wasted, tawdry handful of decades!

It's true, reading too many novels makes you go blind.

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

If not love, then what?