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

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

Just thugs only ever got so far. The best thugs were all psychologists. — China Mieville

Teafortwo was a wyrman. Barrel-chested creatures like squat birds, with thick arms like a human dwarf's below those ugly, functional wings, the wyrmen ploughed the skies of New Crobuzon. Their hands were their feet, those arms jutting from the bottom of their squat bodies like crows' legs. They could pace a few clumsy steps here and there balancing on their palms, if they were indoors, but they preferred to careen over the city, yelling and swooping and screaming abuse at passers-by. The wyrmen were more intelligent than dogs or apes, but decidedly less than humans. They thrived on an intellectual diet of scatology and slapstick and mimicry, picking names for each other gleaned without understanding from popular songs and furniture catalogues and discarded textbooks they could just about read. Teafortwo's sister, Isaac knew, was called Bottletop; one of his sons Scabies. — China Mieville

When the rich grow afraid, they get nasty. — China Mieville

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

Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me. — 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

Anything for gold and experience. — China Mieville

Is it dangerous? Hmm. Well, define 'dangerous.' Is a knife 'dangerous'? Is Russian roulette 'dangerous'? Is arsenic 'dangerous'? ... It really depends on your perspective. — China Mieville

Why should we not shep naches from the accomplishments of our machines? This vicarious joy or success sounds somewhat odd, but it shouldn't be. We get excited when our sports team wins a game; why should it disturb or disappoint us when our creations turn out to be more accomplished than ourselves? — China Mieville

He said, You'll write it not because there's no possibility it'll be found but because it costs too much to not write it. — China Mieville

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

I certainly didn't mind possibly sending the reader to a dictionary once in a while, but I tried not to do it too often. — 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

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

And Lublamai no longer thought of screaming but only of watching as those dark markings rolled and boiled in perfect symetry across the wings like clouds in a night sky above, in water below. — China Mieville

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

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

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

If you didn't know, you wouldn't take him for part-ghost - but you'd know he wanted to be somewhere else. — China Mieville

Language is the continuation of coercion by other means."
"Bullshit. It's cooperation." Both theories explained what had happened plausibly. I resisted, because it felt trite, saying that they weren't as contradictory as they sounded. — China Mieville

[ ... ]i'm not a leftist trying to smuggle in my evil message by the nefarious means of fantasy novels. I'm a science fiction and fantasy geek. I love this stuff. And 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 [ ... ] I'm trying to say I've invented this world that I think is really cool and I have these really big stories to tell in it and one of the ways that I find to make that interesting is to think about it politically. If you want to do that too, that's fantastic. But if not, isn't this a cool monster? — China Mieville

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

Hello slash query is all well? parenthesis enquiry after suitability of timing slash insinuations of warmness sixty percent insinuations of belief that interlocutor has topic to be discussed forty percent blah blah." I raised an eyebrow. "It was pointless. — 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

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

Dane discarded his speargun with visible relief. As a paladin of the Church of God Kraken, he had few options. Like many groups devoid of real power and realpolitik, the church was actually constrained by its aesthetics. Its operatives could not have guns, simply, because guns were not squiddy enough.
It was a common moan. Drunk new soldiers of the Cathedral of the Bees might whine: "It's not that I don't think sting-tipped blowpipes aren't cool, it's just ... " "I've gotten rally good with the steam-cudgel," a disaffected Pistonpunk might ask her elders "but wouldn't it be useful to ... ?" Oh for a carbine, devout assassins pined. — 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 share the streets with aimlessly moving scraps of paper and little whirlwinds of dust, with motes that pass like erratic thieves under eaves and through doors. — China Mieville

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

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

Officers looked at the antique once-animals that eyed them back, at the no giant tank, at the nowhere anything so big and missing as Architeuthis could be. — China Mieville

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

A Kedis troika approached afterward, colourcells winking in their frills, and the shemale speaker thanked him in her curious diction, shaking his hand with her prehensile genitalia. — 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

I wish that there was nothing to hold me here, that gravity was a suggestion I could ignore. — China Mieville

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

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

It is not they who have closed but I. I've cut myself away. I'm alone, and lonely. What frightens me is that I've not become lonely now, but have looked inside and seen that I was, already. How long has that been going on? — 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

I don't generally publicly respond to
reviews, no matter how wrong-headed or perspicacious I think them. Nine times out of ten, writers' responses to critics seem to me at best undignified. — China Mieville

New Crobuzon was a city unconvinced by gravity. — 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

I closed my eyes then but it was too dark to clearly see that vision that my body would conjure out of blood and the inside of skin when light hit it, but I'd seen it so often, examined it so carefully, that it wasn't hard for me to call to mind. — China Mieville

Classification may very well not be useless, but it is never analysis, no matter how baroquely detailed and comprehensive-seeming its categories. At best, it begs questions. At worst it is presumptuous and totalitarian, replacing understanding with filing. We have all heard papers where categories are the driving force, according to which the way we understand literature (or whatever) is to work out what title fits where, as if literary theory was a giant card-catalog. Even when the last book has been slotted neatly into the last of the holes that were cut to be filled with books, what we have are books in neat piles. Which is not nothing, but neither is it that much. — 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

Shadows fell on them like predators as the light went out. — 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

Some midnight-of-all or other [apocalypse] was predicted every few days or nights. Most came to nothing, leaving relevant prophets cringing with a unique embarrassment as the sum rose. It was a very particular shame, that of now ex-worshippers avoiding each other's eyes in the unexpected aftermath of 'final' acts
crimes, admissions, debaucheries and abandon. — China Mieville

A sickly little smile grew and died on his mouth like a fungus. — 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

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

Bellis gasped.
Everywhere lights where suspended. Globes of cold illumination like frost moons, with no trace of the sepia of the New Crobuzon's gaslamps. The city glowed in the darkening water like a net full of ghostly lights.
The outer edges of the city were low buildings in porous stone and coral. — 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

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

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

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

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

As an immerser I progressed to the ranks I aspired to - those that granted me a certain cachet and income while keeping me from fundamental responsibilities. This is what I excelled at: the life-technique of aggregated skill, luck, laziness and chutzpah that we call floaking. — 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

The reading rooms were large and quiet. Their windows were filmed in dust and desiccated insects, and seemed to age the light falling across the communal tables and the volumes in scores of languages. — 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

His Infernal Excellency," he declared, "the ambassador of Hell. — China Mieville

So ... I'm the funny one? I'm the funny sidekick?
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.
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That's no way to talk about anyone! To say they're just hangers-on to someone more important. — China Mieville

I mean course you want a change, we want a change, but if a change ain't godsdamn coming, then the next thing I wish is that I didn't care. — China Mieville

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

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

One moment it was a calculating machine, attempting dispassionately to keep up with the gouts of data. And then awash in those gouts, something metal twitched and a patter of valves sounded that had not been instructed by those numbers. A loop of data was self-generated by the analytical engine. The processor reflected on its creation in a hiss of high-pressure steam. One moment it was a calculating machine. The next, it thought. — 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

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

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

It ain't that he's not interested in, like, persuasiveness, get me? He's interested in it. Like something in a jar. — China Mieville

A dark-windowed diesel train burst out of the building, close enough to make the bus shake. It helter-skeltered downward into the earth. "Where's it going?" Zanna said. "Crossing the Odd, to some of the other abcities," Jones said. "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 ... It's a terminus. — China Mieville

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

She was Remade she was (Remade scum), he knew it, he saw it, and still he felt incessantly what was inside him, and he felt a great scab of habit and prejudice split from him, part from his skin where his homeland had inscribed him deep. [ ... ]There was a caustic pain as he peeled off a clot of old life and exposed himself open and unsure to her, to new air. [ ... ] His feelings welled out and bled together (their festering ceased) and they began to resolve, to heal in a new form, to scar. — China Mieville

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

Into sleep's benthos and deeper. A slander that the deepest parts are lightless. There are moments of phosphor with animal movement. Somatic glimmers, and in the trench of sleep those lights were tiny dreams. — China Mieville

The manager of my line told me, You never put anything down except to be read. Every word ever written is written to be read and if some go unread that's only chance, failure, they're like grubs that die without changing. — China Mieville

You've met our guards." He gestured at the silent cylindrical guide. "The secret warriors: the binja. — China Mieville

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

You'd have known that without being told if you let yourself think about it. — China Mieville

It had acquired a name, Spatters, that reflected the desultory randomness of its outlines: the whole stinking shanty-town seemed to have dribbled like shit from the sky. — 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

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

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

I know your job's to channel the bleeding divine, and when have I ever stood in your way? Aren't I the bloke puts "Do Not Disturb, Eschatology Being Revelationed" on your door? EH? But you're supposed to keep me in the loop, and turn up when I need you, and do me the sheer minimum modicum of salutage and whatnot, right? — China Mieville

The first couple of times she had come here, she had been sure that he changed overnight, that the shards of physiognomy that made up his whole reorganized when no one was looking. She became frightened of her commission. She wondered hysterically if it was like a task in a moral children's tale, if she was to be punished for some nebulous sin by striving to freeze in time a body in flux, forever too afraid to say anything, starting each day from the beginning all over again. — China Mieville

A promise fulfilled may be a classic moment, but prophecies mean anticlimax. How much more awesome was an unexpected salvation? — 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

But this was not quite the right kraken apocalypse. — China Mieville

Just her, three men, a fidgety pig and lawful intent. — China Mieville

Oh, bullshit. This isn't one of those stories, Avice. One moment of cack-handedness, Captain Cook offends the bloody locals, one slip of the tongue or misuse of sacred cutlery, and bang, he's on the grill. Do you ever think about how self-aggrandising that stuff is? Oh, all those stories pretending to be mea culpas about cultural insensitivity, oops, we said the wrong thing, but they're really all about how ridiculous natives overreact. Avice, we must have made thousands of fuckups like that over the years. Think about it. Just like our visitors did when they first met our lot, on Terre. And for the most part we didn't lose our shit, did we? — China Mieville

The light was going: some cloud cover arriving, as if summoned by drama. — China Mieville