China Mieville Quotes

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

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

I couldn't tell if I was perspicacious or paranoid.

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

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.

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.

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

My Google-fu is strong.

I think science fiction is very bad at prediction.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

No one ever got into science fiction for the sex or prestige. They got into it because they love it.

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

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

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

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.

I'm a very friendly socialist.

Remember the movements that don't look like moving.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

London is an endless skirmish between angles and emptiness.

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

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

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.

Any moment called NOW is always full of possibles.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The dead are way more organized than the living.

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.

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.

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.

I don't like allegory.