David Mitchell Quotations | Page 2

We are both busy people, so let's cut the small talk.

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

I'm not a great deep political thinker.

As for reading, I wish I had a magic door to a library where I could go in, read for days and days, and come back in the same minute I left. I'm still looking for the door.

I still haven't quite got used to eating live fish.

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

I think we think in terms of stories.

I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.

I'm from a time and place where bigheadedness was a really savage crime, and you'd get cut down for it by your peers and parents.

Probably in a parallel universe not far from here, I'm working for Nintendo.

People pontificate, "Suicide is selfishness." Career churchmen like Pater go a step further and call in a cowardly assault on the living. Oafs argue this specious line for varying reason: to evade fingers of blame, to impress one's audience with one's mental fiber, to vent anger, or just because one lacks the necessary suffering to sympathize. Cowardice is nothing to do with it - suicide takes considerable courage. Japanese have the right idea. No, what's selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching.

Whoever opined "Money can't buy you happiness" obviously had far too much of the stuff.

Only professional diplomats, inveterate idiots and women view diplomacy as a long-term substitute for war.

One fine day a predatory world shall consume itself.

Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman.

If war's first victim is truth, its second is clerical efficiency.

The rain's innumerable hooves spatter on the streets and roofs.

When insolvent, pack minimally, with a valise tough enough to be thrown onto a London pavement from a first- or second-floor window. Insist on hotel rooms no higher.

If only,’ Shiroyama dreams, ‘human beings were not masks behind masks behind masks. If only this world was a clean board of lines and intersections. If only time was a sequence of considered moves and not a chaos of slippages and blunders.

For white men, to live is to own, or to try to own more, or to die trying to own more. Their appetites are astonishing! They own wardrobes, slaves, carriages, houses, warehouses, and ships. They own ports, cities, plantations, valleys, mountains, chains of islands. They own this world, its jungles, its skies, and its seas. Yet they complain that Dejima is a prison. They complain they are not free.

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.

An idler and a sluggard are as different as a gourmand and a glutton.

We are only what we know, and I wished to be so much more than I was, sorely.

Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience.

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.

If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth and claw, if we believe divers races & creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass.

Why does any martyr cooperate with his judases?...We see a game beyond the endgame...As Seneca warned Nero: No matter how many of us you kill, you will never kill your successor.

The music provokes a sharp longing the music soothes.

Creation never ceased on the sixth evening, it occurs to the young man. Creation unfolds around us, despite us and through us at the speed of days and nights. And we call it love.

One cannot pass by without thinking of the density of men in the ground.

Why fight the 'natural' (oh, weaselly word!) order of things? Why? Because of this--one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.

Hate eats the hater the way ogres eat little boys.

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

Teachers're always using that "in your own words." I hate that. Authors knit their sentences tight. It's their job. Why make us unpick them, just to put it back together more shonkily? How're you s'posed to say Kapellmeister if you can't say Kapellmeister?

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

I have always unswervingly held, that God, in our civilizing world, manifests Himself not in the miracles of biblical age, but in progress. It is progress that leads humanity up the ladder towards the God-head. No Jacob's ladder this, no, but rather Civilization's Ladder, if you will.

The weak are meat the strong do eat.

Men invented money Women invented mutual aid

If you’re in your life, chance. Viewed from the outside, like a book you’re reading, it’s fate all the way.

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.

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.

Probably" is a word with an emergency ejector seat.

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

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 has got some great tricks that it's taught writers.

Perhaps all human interaction is about wanting and getting.

The human world is made of stories, not people.

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

I really wish they hadn't made the set out of asbestos.

If I want to act relaxed, it's going to take all my cunning, skill and concentration.

Italians give their city sexes, and they all agree that the sex for a particular city is quite correct, but none of them can explain why. I love that. London's middle-aged and male, respectably married but secretly gay.

Ive never had cocaine. I work in showbusiness and no one has ever offered me cocaine. Can you believe that? It makes me worry Im not always the life and soul of the party that I feel like in my head,

Wars do not combust without warning. They begin as little fires over the horizon. Wars approach. A wise man watches for the smoke, and prepares to vacate the neighborhood, just like Ayrs and Jocasta. My worry is that the next war will be so big, nowhere with a decent restaurant will be left untouched.

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

Time is the speed at which the past decays.

The Revelation of Sonmi 451 To be is to be perceived, and so to know thyself is only possible through the eyes of the other. The nature of our immortal lives is in the consequences of our words and deeds, that go on and are pushing themselves throughout all time. - Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to others, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.

But no, we cross, crisscross, and recross our old tracks like figure skaters.

You can maintain power over people, as long as you give them something. Rob a man of everything, and that man will no longer be in your power.

Words are very powerful and can lead anyone reading them or hearing them, into contemplation and insight. How the mind follows suit is rarely palpable or expected. This impact is not a matter of metaphysical effects nor of an unexplainable phenomenon. It’s simply part of being human.

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?

Good moods’re as fragile as eggs...Bad moods’re as fragile as bricks.

Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.

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

I feel like something important has happened to meIs this possible?

... 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.

Love's pure free joy when it works, but when it goes bad you pay for the good hours at loan-shark prices.

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

I got a rejection letter from an editor at HarperCollins, who included a report from his professional reader. This report shredded my first-born novel, laughed at my phrasing, twirled my lacy pretensions around and gobbed into the seething mosh pit of my stolen clichés. As I read the report, the world became very quiet and stopped rotating. What poisoned me was the fact that the report's criticisms were all absolutely true. The sound of my landlady digging in the garden got the world moving again. I slipped the letter into the trash... knowing I'd remember every word.

Japanese food makes me feel particularly good.

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

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

Lunatics are writers whose works write them.

Whoever dies with the most stuff wins.

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

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.

I hear my father-in-law's response..."Naïve, dreaming Adam. He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!" Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?

Birdsong foamed in the hour-before-dawn garden.

Go to hell, Willy, our souls eat poetry, but one has seven deadly sins to feed!

Faith shall save your Soul from Death. Without Faith, Death is a drowning, the end of ends, and what sane man wouldn't fear that? But with Faith, Death is nothing worse than the end of the voyage we call life, and the beginning of an eternal voyage in a company of our Loved Ones, with griefs and woes smoothed out, and under the capacity of our Creator...

Don't remember summer even saying goodbye.

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

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

The body is the outermost layer of the mind.

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.

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

There's a link between bigotry and bad spelling.

Writing is such a damn lonely sickness.

Two people who are a little bit deluded in each other's favour. That's what love is, isn't it?

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.

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

Freedom!- is the fatuous jingle of our civilization, but only those deprived of it have the barest inkling re: what the stuff actually is.

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

If losers can exploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term.

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.

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

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.

Try this for deviancy: fabricants are mirrors held up to purebloods' conscience; what purebloods see reflected there sickens them. So they blame you for holding the mirror." I hid my shock by asking when purebloods might blame themselves. Mephi replied, "History suggests, not until they are made to.

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...

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

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