David Mitchell Book Quotations

Books don't offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.

A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.

A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it.

Mother used to say escape is never further than the nearest book.

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

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

I often lose myself in the Sudoku-like challenges of making a book work.

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

Mother used to say escape is never further than the nearest book. Well, Mumsy, no, not really. Your beloved large-print sagas of rags, riches, and heartbreak were no camouflage against the miseries trained on you by the tennis ball launcher of life, were they? But, yes, Mum, there again, you have a point. Books don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.

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.

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