Answering the question 'How would you like to smell?' by saying 'I'd rather I didn't' is also no longer acceptable. It's not playing the game. Men are expected to put some cash into the cosmetic pot too - it's seen as almost feminist not to. What a uniquely capitalist response to that gender inequality: women have been forced by convention for generations - millennia - to spend money on expensive clothes and agonizing shoes, to daub themselves with reality-concealing slap, to smell expensively inhuman, to self-mutilate in pursuit of eternal youth; and this, quite rightly, has come to be deemed unfair. But how do we end this hell? We make men do it too. Well done everyone.

— David Mitchell

Any societies upper-crust is riddled with immorality, how else d'you think they keep their power? Reputation is king of the public sphere, not private. It is dethroned by public acts.

— David Mitchell

As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowing, and tricks devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory.

— David Mitchell

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.

— David Mitchell

A single night is stuffed with minutes, but they leak out, one by one.

— David Mitchell

A sprinkle of last-minute despair gives a soul an agreeably earthy aftertaste.

— David Mitchell

At certain rare moments, a library is a kind of mind.

— David Mitchell

At dawn the waves looked like mountain ranges tipped with gold as sunbeams slanted low under burgundy clouds.

— David Mitchell

Autumn is leaving its mellowness behind for its spiky, rotted stage. Don't remember summer even saying goodbye.

— David Mitchell

A weapon men use against women is the refusal to take them seriously.

— David Mitchell