David Mitchell Quotes

Being young is so hard. You're surrounded by judgment and fear.

I sort of felt like being young was normally written about as being very fun and light-hearted. And I think that's true, but I don't feel like there's a lot of songs about how hard it is when you don't really know who you are or what you want, and you feel like you have to apologize for simply just existing.

I was angry and frustrated when I was younger and didn't know my place in the world.

I've been writing songs since I was a teenager, so one kind of song I've written a lot is about, I don't know, teen angst feelings - feeling unsure of yourself and immature.

I was very lost as a teenager. Which is a horrible way to feel.

If you just watch a teenager, you see a lot of uncertainty.

When I left school I was full of angst, like any teenager, and I channeled it all into comedy.

You don't know who you are when you're 14.

My teenage years were pretty - I have regrets about those years. Obviously everyone knows that as a teenager it's really confusing and your feelings are so raw.

Mad World' hasn't dated because it's expressive of a period I call the teenage menopause, where your hormones are going crazy as you're leaving childhood. Your fingers are on the cliff and you're about to drop off, but somehow you cling on.

'The Darkest Minds' came from a period in my life where I felt my most powerless, when I was a teenager.

I'm, like, finishing up high school. I don't know how you can learn anything from me because I'm still, like, a teenager. I don't know what I'm doing with my life.

Sometimes I feel I don't know even know how to run.

The hardest period in life is one’s twenties. It’s a shame because you’re your most gorgeous, and you’re physically in peak condition. But it’s actually when you’re most insecure and full of self-doubt. When you don’t know what’s going to happen, it’s frightening.

Because I was permanently confused, dissatisfied, unhappy, tormented by inadequacy, driven by wanting towards every kind of impossible future, the attitude of mind described by 'tolerantly amused eyes' was years away from me. I don't think I really saw people then, except as appendages to my needs. It's only now, looking back, that I understood, but at the time I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young.

Almost any age is better than twenty-two.

It can be easy to get caught up in craziness or insecurity.

I actually didn't enjoy being a child particularly at all even though I had nice parents in a comfortable place to live. Just because I was too confused in generating too many answers for myself that just scared me more.

I feel I'm trying to get this really crap car going, and it just keeps stalling on me. And then other times I feel like my life's a train thundering toward me, and I'm in a car stuck on the crossroads and can't get out. Isn't it great being young!

I always think that I’m still this 13-year old boy that doesn’t really know how to be an adult, pretending to live my life, taking notes for when I’ll really have to do it.

Just being young and growing up in this business is hard. Just growing up in general is hard.

To most teenagers, life is a strange uncharted land filled with a mixture of new joys, intensely felt, and painful confusions for which they know no anodyne.

I used to go away for weeks in a state of confusion.

When you come out of your teens, you think you're sussed. But you don't know who you are at 22. You're constantly trying to fit in. You get a little lost.

I was wracked with insecurity.