China Mieville Quotes & Sayings

A haggard man used one of the huts as a home. He lay on a sagging mattress, his head on his pack, surrounded by rubbish - paper, porcelain shards, food remains and unidentifiable debris. His hand was over his eyes. He looked like a failed soldier. Dirt seemed so worked into him that the lines of his face were like writing. — China Mieville

She was intelligent enough to realize that her excitement was childish, but not mature enough to care. — China Mieville

One day I realized that I no longer dreamed of what I would do when I was whole again. My will burned to reach that point, and then suddenly was nothing. I had become nothing more than my desire to fly. I had adjusted, somehow. I had evolved in that unfamiliar region, plodding my stolid way to where the scientists and Remakers of the world congregated. The means had become the end. If I regained my wings, I would become someone new, without the desire that defined me. I saw in that spring damp as I walked endlessly north that I was not looking for fulfilment but for dissolution. I would pass my body on to a newborn, and rest. — China Mieville

I'll never be a minimalist. The fact that the prose is more tightly controlled doesn't for a minute mean that it's minimalist. I very much like arcane words and baroque sentence structure. — China Mieville

The southern half of Riverskin was indistinguishable from Flyside, which it adjoined. It was cheap and not too violent, crowded, mostly good-natured. It was a mixed area, with a large human majority beside small colonies of vodyanoi by the quiet canal, a few solitary outcast cactacae, even a little two-street khepri hive, a rare traditional community outside of Kinken and Creekside. Southern Riverskin was also home to some of the city's small number of more exotic races. There was a shop run by a hotchi family in Bekman Avenue, their spines carefully filed blunt so as not to intimidate their neighbours. There was a homeless llorgiss, which kept its barrel body full of drink and staggered the streets on three unsteady legs. — China Mieville

There were those Hosts who thought something better could have been said and better thoughts therefore thought, had I only been made to do other things than I had. That I could have been a better simile for those in need of one to speak precisely; to speak about those somethings other than me that I was - they would have asserted - like. But those critics of course couldn't say what those thoughts would have been, because they could not have them. — China Mieville

History seemed meaningless here, or at least bewildered. — China Mieville

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

One of the things that I love so much about fantasy and science fiction is that the weirdness that it creates is always at its best completely its own end and also metaphorically and symbolically laden. — China Mieville

In the right context you can make words do all kinds of things. — China Mieville

Virgina Woolf versus Edward Lear."
"Christ Alive," said Billy. "Are those my only choices?"
"I went for Lear," said Leon. "Partly out of fidelity to the letter L. Partly because given the choice between nonsense and boojy wittering you blatantly have to choose nonsense. — China Mieville

Tell me," Bren said. "I thought you'd despaired."
"I did, too."
"What then? Tell me."
I told him. Revelation was spoiled for him, but I can retain it here, for you. — China Mieville

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

Volunteering's an early and strong indication that you're not suited, he said. — China Mieville

I was too abstract. I was not worthy of respect. There ... was a madness ... I was mad. I committed a heinous act, a heinous act ... " His words broke down into avian moans. "What did you do?" Isaac steeled himself to hear of some atrocity. "This language cannot express my crime. In my tongue ... " Yagharek stopped for a moment. "I will try to translate. In my tongue they said ... they were right ... I was guilty of choice-theft ... choice-theft in the second degree ... with utter disrespect. — China Mieville

You cannot train yourself to successfully and sustainedly unsee and unhear - you do them all the time, but they also fail, repeatedly, and you cheat, repeatedly, in all sorts of small ways. The book mentions that several times. It is absolutely about absolute fidelity to those particular urban protocols, exaggerations or extrapolations of the ones that I think are all around us all the time in the real world; but it's also about cheating them, and failing them, and playing a little fast and loose, which I think is an inextricable part of such norms. — China Mieville

You got to be worried when they're agreeing about anything," she said. "Prophets. That's the last bloody thing you want prophets to do. — China Mieville

Gods it's well done, she thought, bowing her head, acknowledging consummate work. She felt skeins of cause, effect, effort, and interaction tying around her. She felt things all coming together, pushing her into this place, at this time, having done this thing. — China Mieville

Was it that these particular occult streets had been made, then hidden? Their names leaked as traps in an elaborate double-bluff, so that no one could go except those who knew that such
traps were actually destinations? Or were there really no streets there when the traps were set? Perhaps these cul-de-scas were residues, yawned into illicit existence when the atlases were drawn up by liars. — China Mieville

The unwritten novel has a basilisk's stare. — China Mieville

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

Dark came early and stayed full of lights and the shouts of children. — China Mieville

I love monsters. — China Mieville

I needed to be alone for whatever would happen. I knew that something would as certainly as if this were a last chapter. — China Mieville

If the techs are on it we're fine, but Briamiv and his buddy could fuck up a full stop at the end of a sentence. — China Mieville

It is a jungle where hierarchies of infinities tower like prehistoric beasts. — China Mieville

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

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

Once I said to my father, 'Why do you want me?'
I still think that's the bravest thing I've ever done. — China Mieville

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

Do please," said Captain Naphi, "expedite this journey relevance-ward. — China Mieville

Death isn't what it used to be — China Mieville

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

The point is that you are an individual inasmuch as you exist in a social matrix of others who respect your individuality and your right to make choices. That's concrete individuality: an individuality that it owes its existence to a kind of communal respect on the part of all the other individualities, and that it had better therefore respect them similarly. — China Mieville

The one that goes: I'd like to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather. Not screaming in terror like his passengers. — China Mieville

I feel fantastically geeky. [But] I'm not one of those people who's enormously proud of being a geek, but nor am I particularly ashamed of it. — China Mieville

Any moment called now is always full of possibles. — China Mieville

Either way, it is a curio of the moment that hard-left advocates of 'all power to the soviets' were delegated by a soviet opponent to defend the Soviet currently arguing furiously against taking the power they wanted it to take. Those — China Mieville

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

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

He had since forever been working on a book called Uncanny Blossom. When Leon had told him, Billy had said, "I had no idea you were entering the Shit Title Olympics." "If you didn't swim in your sump of ignorance you'd know that title's designed to fuck with the French. Neither word's translatable into their ridiculous language. — China Mieville

This gentleman is cactus," said Doul. — China Mieville

The fucking angels of memory were out. They had come out of their museums, out of their castles. They'd gone to war against whatever this incoming to-come was. The very facts of retrospection and fate that had various sides fighting were now out themselves, personified or apotheosed and smacking seven bells out of each other directly No longer solely reasons, justifications, teloi, casus belli for others to invoke or believe in: now combatants. The war had just got meta. — China Mieville

When I write my novels, I'm not writing them to make political points. I'm writing them because I passionately love monsters and the weird and horror stories and strange situations and surrealism, and what I want to do is communicate that. But, because I come at this with a political perspective, the world that I'm creating is embedded with many of the concerns that I have. But I never let them get in the way of the monsters. — China Mieville

Were you terrified, Murgatroyd?" Murgatroyd nodded eagerly. "There you go, girl: You're a terrorist. You make me twitchy, and under Article Forty-One of the 2000 Terrorism Bill, that's all I need. Time for some reasonable force, I think. — China Mieville

I don't want to be a simile anymore,' I said. I want to be a metaphor. — China Mieville

Well I don't feel sectarian against sparseness, although I sometimes get a little chippy about this. I resent the way that a certain notion of parsimony has become the norm for skilful literary writing. — China Mieville

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

Where's the skill in being a hero if you were always destined to do it? — China Mieville

What I always try to do in all my books is to make the stories such that if you don't agree with me politically or you're not interested in the thematics, the story will still keep you turning the pages. — China Mieville

There were times, Sham felt, when the captains regretted there being only two types of limb they could lose to their obsessions. — China Mieville

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

It was not a purer realm that loomed vastly over the city. Smokestacks punctured the membrane between the land and the air and disgorged tons of poisonous smog into that upper world as if out of spite. In a thicker, stinking haze just above the rooftops, the detritus from a million low chimneys eddied together. Crematoria vented into the airborne ashes of wills burnt by jealous executors, which mixed with coaldust burnt to keep dying lovers warm. Thousands of sordid smoke-ghosts wrapped New Crobuzon in a stench that suffocated like guilt. — China Mieville

These felt very much like last moments. — China Mieville

As he got older, Billy suspected, he would, Dicaprio-like, simply become like an increasingly wizened child. — China Mieville

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

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

Saul was going to kill Anansi.
They both knew it. Saul was going to kill Anansi and Loplop and King Rat, and Saul was going to die, all in an effort to prove that he was not his rat-father's son. — China Mieville

'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

I love you, you light me, warm me, you are suns. — China Mieville

Get back to work, he would tell himself sternly. There's a garuda to get airborne. — China Mieville

I have some gold. I will interest you. Pity me. I beg you to help me. — China Mieville

But sometimes it ain't the strongest wins. And especially when the stronger thinks, because it's stronger, that it ain't got to try to fight. — China Mieville

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

The choice not to have sex, not to be hurt. The choice not to risk pregnancy. And then ... what if she had become pregnant? The choice not to abort? The choice not to have a child? — China Mieville

They are too stupid to fear. Vertigo is too complex for them. — China Mieville

The Tattoo. You wouldn't say "charming"
that was hardly the adjective, but something, there was something to him. If you were deep in self-hate but stained with ego enough that you needed your death-drive diluted, eager for muteness and quiet, your object-envy strong but not untouched by angst, you might succumb to the Tattoo's brutal enticement. — China Mieville

What you up to, Isaac? They're so egalitarian ... well ... Their society's all based on maximizing choice for the individual, which is why they're communistic. Grants the most uninhibited choice to everyone. And as far as I remember the only crime they have is depriving another garuda of choice. And then it's exacerbated or mollified depending on whether they do it with or without respect, which they absolutely love ... — China Mieville

I hoped the hunter would come. I imagined him pushing through the thickets in the foothills. I've thought of him like that often since, as if he's still out there, game in his sights, intending to check on me on his return. — China Mieville

The city's a heart, I said, and in that a heart and a city were sutured into a third thing, a heartish city, and cities are heart-stained, and hearts are city-stained too. — China Mieville

You can tell it any way you want, he said, you can be I or he or she or we or they or you and you won't be lying, though you might be telling two stories at once. — China Mieville

We cannot see the universe. We are in the darkness of a trench, a deep cut, dark water heavier than earth, presences lit by our own blood, little biolumes, heroic and pathetic Promethei too afraid or weak to steal fire but able still to love. Gods are among us and they care nothing and are nothing like us.
This is how we are brave: we worship them anyway. — China Mieville

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

Indeed, an astoundingly small proportion of arguments 'for free speech' and 'against censorship' or 'banning' are, in fact, about free speech, censorship or banning. It is depressing to have to point out, yet again, that there is a distinction between having the legal right to say something & having the moral right not to be held accountable for what you say. Being asked to apologise for saying something unconscionable is not the same as being stripped of the legal right to say it. It's really not very f-cking complicated. Cry "free speech" in such contexts, you are demanding the right to speak any bilge you wish without apology or fear of comeback. You are demanding not legal rights but an end to debate about and criticism of what you say. When did bigotry get so needy? This assertive & idiotic failure to understand that juridical permissibility backed up by the state is not the horizon of politics or morality is absurdly resilient. — China Mieville

There are no telepaths in this universe, I think, but there are empathics, with languages so silent that they may as well be sharing thoughts. — China Mieville

There is the heat, which clots the air around her and stops up her pores and her eyes and ears — China Mieville

Strictly speaking, she thought, this place was a cross between a forest and a jungle. "This is a jorest," she said to Hemi. "Yeah," he said. "No, it's a fungle." They grinned. — China Mieville

UnLondon would have to look after itself. She wasn't the Shwazzy. She was just someone. How could just someone be any help, whatever was going on? — China Mieville

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

There was a hubbub in Billy's head all night. He would hardly call so raging and discombobulated a torrent of images a dream. Call it a vomit, call it a gush.
He was back in the water, not braving but frowning, synchronised swimming, not swimming but sinking, toward the godsquid he knew was there, a tentacular fleshscape and the moon-sized eye that he never saw but knew, as if the core of the fucking planet was not searing metal but mollusc, as if what we fall toward when we fall, what the apple was heading for when Newton's head got in the way, was kraken. — China Mieville

I have a rule: I prefer anyone who doesn't try to kill me to anyone who does. I'm funny that way. — China Mieville

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

So what's your alternative? people say, as if that's logic. We don't have to have an alternative, that's not how critique works. We may do, and if we do, you're welcome, but if we don't that no more invalidates our hate for this, for what is, than does that of a serf for her lord, her flail-backed insistence that this must end, whether or not she accompanies it with a blueprint for free wage labor. — China Mieville

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

There is no case," he told her. "There's a series of random and implausible crises that make no sense other than if you believe the most dramatic possible shit. And there's a dead girl at the end of it all. — China Mieville

Devils and Nazis don't work well together. — China Mieville

Palgolak was a god of knowledge ... He was an amiable, pleasant deity, a sage whose existence was entirely devoted to the collection, categorization, and dissemination of information ... Palgolak's library ... did not lend books, but it did allow readers in at any time of the day or night, and there were very, very few books it did not allow access to. The Palgolaki were proselytizers, holding that everything known by a worshipper was immediately known by Palgolak, which was why they were religiously charged to read voraciously. But their mission was only secondarily for the glory of Palgolak, and primarily for the glory of knowledge, which was why they were sworn to admit all who wished to enter into their library. — China Mieville

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

A bridge wants to not be. If it could choose its shape, a bridge would be no shape, an unspace to link One-place-town to Another-place-town over a river or a road or a tangle of railway tracks or a quarry, or to attach an island to another island or to the continent from which it strains. The dream of a bridge is of a woman standing at one side of a gorge and stepping out as if her job is to die, but when her foot falls it meets the ground right on the other side. A bridge is just better than no bridge but its horizon is gaplessness, and the fact of itself should still shame it. — China Mieville

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

At the social/political/ juridical, etc., level, the organizing principle was less to do with games and more to do with the nature of taboos - enormously powerful, often enormously arbitrary, and (crucially) regularly quietly broken, without undermining the fact of the taboo itself. That last element, I think, is sometimes underestimated in the discussions of cultural norms, where they are both asserted and breached. Both those elements are foundational.
- author interview — China Mieville

I just can't get with this idea that literature is a 12-step program. If someone wants to read a book to see good people get rewarded and the bad people get punished, essentially what they want is a fairy tale. — China Mieville

Things are going up in fire and never been there." When she looked no wiser he said, "There was a warehouse in Finchley. Round between the bath shop and the Pizza Hut. I know there was because I used to go there and because I've seen it." He tap-tapped his eyepiece again. "But 'seen it' butters no bleeding parsnips these days. That warehouse burnt down, and now it didn't ever was there. The bath shop and the Pizza Hut are joined up now, and the only ash blowing around there's a charred bit of never. — China Mieville

...terrorism could not win once the real terror went. — China Mieville

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

Vessels knocked together for hour upon hour, like bones, like someone infinitely stupid and patient at the door of an empty house. — China Mieville

How do you ... ? What is it you're doing?" he said to Vardy as the man took a breath, mid-insight. What do you call that? Billy thought. That reconstitutitive intelligence, berserker meme-splicing, seeing in nothings first patterns, then correspondence, then causality and dissident sense.
Vardy even smiled. "Paranoid," he said. "Theology. — China Mieville

Collingswood frowned at the clouds, like she did not like what they wrote. — China Mieville

A classic unspoken agreement among escapees from a small town: don't look back, don't be each other's anchors, no nostalgia. — China Mieville

Those created creations were treated like tools that talked, their sentience an annoying product of magic noise, by those little mortal demiurges who thought dominion a natural by-product of expertise or creation. — China Mieville