Quotes by David Mitchell

Integrity is a bugger, it really is. Lying can get you into difficulties, but to really wind up in the crappers try telling nothing but the truth.

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

How gleefully life shreds our well crafted plans.

Hey, metaphysics seminar is on the roof. Just take the elevator up and keep walking until you hit the sidewalk. Anything is true if enough people believe it.

Teachersre always using that in your own words. I hate that. Authors knit their sentences tight. Its their job. Why make us unpick them, just to put it back together more shonkily? Howre you sposed to say Kapellmeister if you cant say Kapellmeister?

Our ancestors built temples for their gods. We build department stores.

There are different ways people make this place. Sweat, exercise and pain is one way. You can see them in the gyms, in the well-ordered swimming pools. You can see them jogging in the small, worn parks. Another way to make your place is TV. A bright, brash place, always well lit, full of fun and jokes that tell you when to laugh so you never miss them. World news carefully edited so that it’s not too disturbing, but disturbing enough to make you glad that you weren’t born in a foreign country. News with music to tell you who to hate, who to feel sorry for, and who laugh at.

Go on, my dear, urges the snake. Take one. Hear it? Pluck me, its saying. That big, shiny red one. Pluck me, pluck me now and pluck me hard. You know you want to., clever girl, expressly forbids us to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge.?Eve folds her arms schoolgirlishly. God expressly forbade it. Adam said.The snake grins through his fangs, admiring Eves playacting. God is a nice enough chap in His way. I daresay He means well. But between you and The Tree of Knowledge, He is terribly insecure.Insecure? He made the entire bloody universe! Hes omnipotent.Exactly! Almost neurotic, isnt it? All this worshiping, morning, noon, and night. Its Oh Praise Him, Oh Praise Him, Oh Praise the Everlassssting Lord. I dont call that omnipotent. I call it pathetic. Most independent authorities agree that God has never sufficiently credited the work of virtual particles in the creation of the universssse. He raises you and Adam on this diet of myths while all the really interesting information is locked up in these juicy apples. Seven days? Give me a break.

Three or four times only in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides... I mistook them for adulthood. Assuming they were a fixed feature in my lifes voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach. Young ruddy fool. What wouldnt I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable? To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.

I put my hand on the altar rail. What if ... what if Heaven is real, but only in moments? Like a glass of water on a hot day when youre dying of thirst, or when someones nice to you for no reason, or ... Mams pancakes with Toblerone sauce; Dad dashing up from the bar just to tell me, Sleep tight, dont let the bedbugs bite; or Jacko and Sharon singing For Shes A Squishy Marshmallow instead of For Shes A Jolly Good Fellow every single birthday and wetting themselves even though its not at all funny; and Brendan giving his old record player to me instead of one of his mates. Spose Heavens not like a painting thats just hanging there for ever, but more like ... Like the best song anyone ever wrote, but a song you only catch in snatches, while youre alive, from passing cars, or ... upstairs windows when youre lost ...

Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable haemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed. Like Schrödinger’s cat inside a box you can never ever open.

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 ones audience with ones 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, whats selfish is to demand another to endure an intolerable existence, just to spare families, friends, and enemies a bit of soul-searching.

Faith, the least exclusive club on Earth, has the craftiest doorman. Every time Ive stepped through its wide-open doorway, I find myself stepping out on the street again.

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

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.

Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my years fragments into a sextet for overlapping soloists: piano, clarinet, cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shant know until its finished, and by then itll be too late.

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

Go on, my dear, urges the snake. Take one. Hear it? Pluck me, its saying. That big, shiny red one. Pluck me, pluck me now and pluck me hard. You know you wan

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.

Books dont offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.