China Mieville quotes

Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.
-- China Mieville

#Ideas #Ridiculous #Fantastic

I have danced with the spider. I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god.
-- China Mieville

#Cutting #Dancing #Mad

I do, however, feel reasonably strongly the sense that the job of a piece of argumentative scholarly non-fiction is not the same as the job of a piece of fiction.
-- China Mieville

#Jobs #Fiction #Pieces

Word spread because word will spread. Stories and secrets fight, stories win, shed new secrets, which new stories fight, and on.
-- China Mieville

#Fighting #Winning #Secret

We would never call inexplicable little insights hunches, for fear of drawing the universe's attention. But they happened, and you knew you had been in the proximity of one that had come through if you saw a detective kiss his or her fingers and touch his or her chest where a pendant to Warsha, patron saint of inexplicable inspirations, would, theoretically, hang.
-- China Mieville

#Life #Inspiration #Kissing

I'm a very friendly socialist.
-- China Mieville

#Friendly #Socialist

In every book I write, I try to name-check the most prominent influences, or the most prominent conscious influences.
-- China Mieville

#Book #Writing #Names

Personally I don't like it when writers become excessively proscriptive about the way that people read their books.
-- China Mieville

#Book #People #Way

There's plenty of stuff that I don't feel dissident about: I really like tea, I don't have any problem with that. I like lots of paintings.
-- China Mieville

#Tea #Stuff #Painting

I think the role of science fiction is not at all to prophesy. I think it is to tell interesting, vivid, strange stories that at their best are dreamlike intense versions and visions of today.
-- China Mieville

#Thinking #Interesting #Vision

I'm a science fiction and fantasy geek.
-- China Mieville

#Fiction #Geek #Fantasy

I'd never been to a science-fiction convention until I became a professional writer.
-- China Mieville

#Fiction #Science Fiction #Conventions

I think science fiction is very bad at prediction.
-- China Mieville

#Thinking #Fiction #Science Fiction

Fantastic fiction covers fantasy, horror and science fiction - and it doesn't get the attention it deserves from the literati.
-- China Mieville

#Fiction #Attention #Fantasy

The summer stretched out the daylight as if on a rack. Each moment was drawn out until its anatomy collapsed. Time broke down. The day progressed in an endless sequence of dead moments.
-- China Mieville

#Summer #Daylight #Moments

A lot of geeks are pale, bespectacled, wear dark clothing and don't get out much - the stereotype exists because it is very often true. I could pass for a non-geek but it would be inaccurate.
-- China Mieville

#Dark #Would Be #Geek

I like the idea of trying to write a book in every genre.
-- China Mieville

#Book #Writing #Ideas

Ever since I was two, I've loved octopuses, monsters, abandoned buildings.
-- China Mieville

#Two #Octopus #Monsters

I don't like allegory.
-- China Mieville

#Allegory

I love it when people want to interpret my books.
-- China Mieville

#Book #People #Want

I remember vividly what it's like to read as a 10-year-old - that passionate inhabiting of a book.
-- China Mieville

#Book #Years #Passionate

But I do think it's important to remember that writers do not have a monopoly of wisdom on their books. They can be wrong about their own books, they can often learn about their own books.
-- China Mieville

#Book #Thinking #Important

Every book I write, the first thing I have to do is get into the voice, and the voice varies from book to book - that's part of what's interesting to me.
-- China Mieville

#Book #Writing #Voice

Geeks run the world. Condoleezza Rice is a geek, Bill Gates is clearly a geek, many of the big filmmakers and writers are geeks, lots of military people are geeks. Anyone who has heard Donald Rumsfeld talk about military hardware knows they are in the presence of a geek.
-- China Mieville

#Running #Military #People

Socialism and SF are the two most fundamental influences in my life.
-- China Mieville

#Two #Fundamentals #Influence

When I'm writing a book, generally I start with the mood and setting, along with a couple of specific images—things that have come into my head, totally abstracted from any narrative, that I've fixated on. After that, I construct a world, or an area, into which that general setting, that atmosphere, and the specific images I've focused on can fit.
-- China Mieville

#Couple #Book #Writing

My parents were hippies, and the story is that they went through a dictionary looking for a beautiful word to name me. They nearly called me Banyan, but flipped a few pages on and reached "China," thankfully. The other reason they liked it is that "china" is Cockney rhyming slang for "mate." People say "my old china," meaning "my old mate," because "china plate" rhymes with "mate.
-- China Mieville

#Beautiful #Hippie #Names

So long as it fated, fate didn't care what it fated.
-- China Mieville

#Fate #Long #Care

My job is not to try to give readers what they want but to try to make readers want what I give.
-- China Mieville

#Jobs #Writing #Giving

The reason that I like SF and fantasy and horror is that to me it's the pulp wing of surrealism. That's the aesthetic of undermining and creative alienation that I really go for.
-- China Mieville

#Wings #Creative #Fantasy

Any moment called NOW is always full of possibles.
-- China Mieville

#Moments

There are only so many ways to experience pain. There are an almost limitless number of ways to inflict it, but the pain itself, initially vividly distinct in all its specifications, becomes, inevitably, just pain.
-- China Mieville

#Pain #Numbers #Way

A city like London was always going to be a paradox, the best of it so very riddled with the opposite, so Swiss-cheesed with moral holes.
-- China Mieville

#Opposites #Cities #London

London is an endless skirmish between angles and emptiness.
-- China Mieville

#London #Emptiness #Angle

You can't see the future, there's no such thing. It's all bets. You'll never get the same answer from two seers. But that doesn't mean either of them's wrong.
-- China Mieville

#Future #Mean #Two

There is no knowing beyond that membrane, the meniscus of death. What can be seen from here is distorted, refracted. All we can know are those untrustworthy glimpses--that and rumour. The prattle. The dead gossip: it is the reverberation of that gossip against the surface tension of death that the better mediums hear. It is like listening to whispered secrets through a toilet door. It is a crude and muffled susurrus.
-- China Mieville

#Death #Doors #Knowing

I always felt sorry for the sidekick as a kid. They never got their due and it left a very bad taste in the mouth - they are defined by a subordinate relationship to someone else. I always felt like a bit of sidekick when I was a kid and it didn't feel fair.
-- China Mieville

#Sorry #Kids #Sidekicks

Kraken' is a very undisciplined book. That's a gamble. If it doesn't come off, it's disastrous. But there are pleasures, I think, to a meandering lack of discipline that you can't get the other way, and vice versa.
-- China Mieville

#Book #Thinking #Kraken

In the field of fantastic fiction, the question of world-building is not uncontroversial. But I grew up with 'Dungeons and Dragons,' so that whole world-building thing is very close to my heart.
-- China Mieville

#Heart #Dragons #Dungeons

I'll tell you, I've never particularly been a 'Trek' person. I feel about 'Trek' the way one feels about known, vaguely liked, but rather distant members of one's family.
-- China Mieville

#Way #Members #Feels

I think there's something quite interesting about the almost tragic quality of a lot of overwrought prose, because it has a much more self-conscious awareness of its own failure to touch the real.
-- China Mieville

#Real #Thinking #Self

To take the choice of another ... to forget their concrete reality, to abstract them, to forget that you are a node in a matrix, that actions have consequences. We must not take the choice of another being. What is community but a means to ... for all we individuals to have ... our choices.
-- China Mieville

#Mean #Reality #Choices

While yes we can both agree the sudden recovery of this footage smells not a little, and that we appear to be bits of tinfoil-on-string to some malevolent government kitten, yes yes yes but, Borlu, however they've come by this evidence, this is the correct decision.
-- China Mieville

#Recovery #Government #Smell

I'd never understood the injunction not to regret anything, couldn't see how that wasn't cowardice...
-- China Mieville

#Regret #Cowardice #Understood

Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not.
-- China Mieville

#Book #Sometimes #Conversation

Perhaps the window is not a sun but an asterisk, interrupting the grammar of the sky, with me sitting below it like a footnote.
-- China Mieville

#Sky #Sitting #Sun

My Google-fu is strong.
-- China Mieville

#Strong #Google

My sustenance is information. My interventions are hidden. I increase as I learn. I compute, so I am.
-- China Mieville

#Information #Increase #Intervention

The Weaver is a really godlike power. It's not even a blind idiot god, a sort of Lovecraft thing, it's just a purely capricious god. It's an intelligence you can't understand, so you can't trust it." -Amazon.com interview
-- China Mieville

#Interviews #Amazon #Idiot

Fantasy and science fiction can be literal as well as allegorical and there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a monster like a giant squid for what it is, as well as searching for metaphor.
-- China Mieville

#Squids #Monsters #Giants

Subby Subby Subby," whispered Goss. "Keep those little bells on your slippers as quiet as you can. Sparklehorse and Starpink have managed to creep out of Apple Palace past all the monkeyfish, but if we're silent as tiny goblins we can surprise them and then all frolic off together in the Meadow of Happy Kites.
-- China Mieville

#Past #Apples #Together

Art is something you choose to make... it's a bringing together of... of everything around you into something that makes you more human, more khepri, whatever. More of a person.
-- China Mieville

#Art #Together #Humans

My dad hates umbrellas, said Deeba, swinging her own. When it rains he always says the same thing. 'I do not believe the presence of moisture in the air is sufficient reason to overturn society's usual sensible taboo against wielding spiked clubs at eye level.
-- China Mieville

#Dad #Hate #Rain

A sickly little smile grew and died on his mouth like a fungus.
-- China Mieville

#Mouths #Littles #Fungi

If you're brave enough to try, you might be able to catch a train from UnLondon to Parisn't, or No York, or Helsunki, or Lost Angeles, or Sans Francisco, or Hong Gone, or Romeless.
-- China Mieville

#San Francisco #Brave #Trying

In time, in time they tell me, I'll not feel so bad. I don't want time to heal me. There's a reason I'm like this. I want time to set me ugly and knotted with loss of you, marking me. I won't smooth you away. I can't say goodbye.
-- China Mieville

#Goodbye #Healing #Loss

Loads of children read books about dinosaurs, underwater monsters, dragons, witches, aliens, and robots. Essentially, the people who read SF, fantasy and horror haven't grown out of enjoying the strange and weird.
-- China Mieville

#Children #Book #Dragons

Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole.
-- China Mieville

#Inspirational #Get Well #Healing

It had not been a long journey, but the memory of it filled her like an infection. She had felt tethered by time to the city behind her, so that the minutes stretched out taut as she moved away, and slowed the farther she got, dragging out her little voyage.
-- China Mieville

#Memories #Journey #Cities

The dead are way more organized than the living.
-- China Mieville

#Way #Organized

We speak now or I do, and others do. You've never spoken before. You will. You'll be able to say how the city is a pit and a hill and a standard and an animal that hunts and a vessel on the sea and the sea and how we are fish in it, not like the man who swims weekly with fish but the fish with which he swims, the water, the pool. I love you, you light me, warm me, you are suns. You have never spoken before.
-- China Mieville

#Love You #Animal #Men

A scholar can never let mere wrongness get in the way of the theory.
-- China Mieville

#Way #Theory #Scholar

I differ with myself then agree, like the rock that was broken and cemented together. I change my opinion.
-- China Mieville

#Rocks #Broken #Together

Anything for gold and experience.
-- China Mieville

#Gold

...where's the skill in being a hero if you were always destined to do it?
-- China Mieville

#Hero #Skills #Being A Hero

We should have just killed him, that's a lesson, don't get creative with revenge
-- China Mieville

#Revenge #Creative #Lessons

Is it more childish and foolish to insist that there is a conspiracy or that there is not?
-- China Mieville

#Conspiracy #Foolish

It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.
-- China Mieville

#Children #Thinking #Youth

For every action, there's an infinity of outcomes. Countless trillions are possible, many milliards are likely, millions might be considered probable, several occur as possibilities to us as observers - and one comes true.
-- China Mieville

#Might #Outcomes #Infinity

People have wanted to narrate since first we banged rocks together & wondered about fire. There’ll be tellings as long as there are any of us here, until the stars disappear one by one like turned-out lights.
-- China Mieville

#Stars #Fire #Light

In the deepest places, where physical norms collapse under the crushing water, bodies still fall softly through the dark, days after their vessels have capsized. They decay on their long journey down. Nothing will hit the black sand at the bottom of the world but algae-covered bones.
-- China Mieville

#Crush #Fall #Dark

A sense of wrongness, of fraught unease, as if long nails scraped the surface of the moon, raising the hackles of the soul.
-- China Mieville

#Moon #Long #Soul

Everything has changed. I cannot be used anymore. Those days are over. I know too much. What I do now, I do for me.
-- China Mieville

#Too Much #Used #Changed

Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.
-- China Mieville

#Memories #Past #Stitches

Someone came in all Starfleet badges today. Not on my shift, sadly.' 'Fascist,' Leon had said. 'Why are you so prejudiced against nerds?' 'Please,' Billy said. 'That would be a bit self-hating, wouldn't it?' 'Yeah, but you pass. You're like, you're in deep cover,' Leon said. 'You can sneak out of the nerd ghetto and hide the badge and bring back food and clothes and word of the outside world.
-- China Mieville

#Hate #Ghetto #Clothes

The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back.
-- China Mieville

#Writing #Way #Novel

Remember the movements that don't look like moving.
-- China Mieville

#Moving #Looks #Movement

A trap is only a trap if you don't know about it. If you know about it, it's a challenge.
-- China Mieville

#Challenges #Traps

The problem with most genre fantasy is that it's not nearly fantastic enough. It's escapist, but it can't escape.
-- China Mieville

#Fantasy #Problem #Enough

I couldn't tell if I was perspicacious or paranoid.
-- China Mieville

#Paranoid

Old stories would tell how Weavers would kill each other over aesthetic disagreements, such as whether it was prettier to destroy an army of a thousand men or to leave it be, or whether a particular dandelion should or should not be plucked. For a Weaver, to think was to think aesthetically. To act--to Weave--was to bring about more pleasing patterns. They did not eat physical food: they seemed to subsist on the appreciation of beauty.
-- China Mieville

#Appreciation #Army #Men