David Mitchell Quotes

To enslave an individual troubles your consciences, Archivist, but to enslave a clone is no more troubling than owning the latest six-wheeler ford, ethically. Because you cannot discern our difference...

Disco's are tricky. You look a total wally if you dance too early but after one crucial song tips the disco over, you look a sad saddo if you don't.

Where there’s bluster, thinks Luisa, there’s duplicity

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

Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules, only outcome...

Taking it all the way to a disciplinary procedure and talking to a national newspaper is the mark of an unusual man. But is he principled or just stubborn? Righteous or self-righteous? Would it be a b...

I think all writers of my age who are brought up on films probably by the age of 16 have seen many more films than they have read classics of literature. We can't help but be influenced by film. Film...

Now I seen Mauna Kena from Honokaa b'fore, o'course, but a mountain you're planning on climbin' ain't the same as the one you ain't. It ain't so pretty, nay.

There is no God but the one we dream up.

Come now, what's a reviewer? I reasoned. One who reads quickly, arrogantly, but never wisely...

I consider how you don’t get to choose whom you’re attracted to, you only get to wonder about it, retrospectively. Racial differences I’ve always found to have an aphrodisiac effect on me, but class d...

Spring adds, summer multiplies, autumn subtracts, winter divides.

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

I rarely feel despair, I forget how it gouges.

I wish all this never had to change, says Rafiq, unexpectedly. I’m pleased he’s content and sad that a kid so young knows that nothing lasts.

Like Solzhenitsyn, I shall return, one bright dusk.

…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.

Deeper’n that it’s this. The savage sat’fies his needs now. He’s hungry, he’ll eat. He’s angry, he’ll knuckly. He’s swellin’, he’ll shoot up a woman. His master is his will, an’ if his will say-soes K...

I said something about reading not being knowledge, about knowledge without experience being food without sustenance.

The human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature.