Quotes from David Mitchell

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

Perhaps all human interaction is about wanting and getting.

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.

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.

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

People are obscenities. Would rather be music than be a mass of tubes squeezing semisolids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it'll no longer function.

…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.

The sacred is a fine hiding place for the profane.

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

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

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

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

Science devises ever bloodier means of war until humanity's powers of destruction overcome our powers of creation and our civilisation drives itself to extinction.

Anticipating the end of the world is humanity's oldest passtime

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

over 85% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

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

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

Many children are natural fantasists, I think, perhaps because their imaginations have yet to be clobbered into submission by experience.

A novelist needs to know his own strong points and weak points.

If the human condition were the periodic table, maybe love would be hydrogen at No. 1. Death would be helium at No. 2. Power, I reckon, would be where oxygen is.

Fantasy. Lunacy. All revolutions are, until they happen, then they are historical inevitabilities.

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'.

...there ain't no journey what don't change you some.