David Mitchell Quotes - Page 6

Perpetual encagement endows any mirage of salvation with credibility.

But you have read Madame Bovary?' (I'd never heard of her books.) 'No.

I can write pretty much anywhere.

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

I've become a less brave traveller since I became a dad, but in the past I was more foolhardy than brave.

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

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

So little is actually worthy of belief or disbelief. Better to strive to coexist than seek to disapprove . . .

I can't bear living in this huge beautiful world and not try to imitate it as best I can.

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.

I elbowed my way into the grubby café, bought a pie that tasted of shoe polish and a pot of tea with cork crumbs floating in it, and eavesdropped on a pair of Shetland pony breeders. Despondency makes one hanker after lives one never led. Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or they don't, will is pitted against will. "Admire me, for I am a metaphor.

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'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.

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.

Write something every single day, even if it's just three lines. And it doesn't matter if it's any good - just write something every day.

When I think about it, I'm happily bewildered that people will preorder my books They'll preorder me. What a lucky guy!

Strip back the beliefs pasted on by governesses, schools, and states, you find indelible truths at one's core.

Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president's pen or a vainglorious general's sword.

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

I'm not a great deep political thinker.

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.

As long as our civilisation keeps trundling along generally forwards, then there is the possibility of a future where ethnicity is merely an interesting badge, not a uniform you can't take off.

I think we think in terms of stories.

Loneliness is an integral part of travelling. I used to think it was the downside to travelling, but now I realise it is a necessary educative part of it to be embraced.