China Mieville Quotes

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

Anxieties and controversies were now as clearly traceable through it as woodgrain through varnish. ~ China Mieville

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

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

Billy walked into a hall where though it was windowless there was not only light but shafts of it, ajut from the ceiling, each starting at a random point in the unbroken surface and crazy-pillaring down in random crosshatched directions, as if the room were nostalgic for moonbeams it had never seen and grew its own simulacra. He walked through and under those interlaced fat fingers of imagined light toward a waiting thing. ~ China Mieville

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

Same weather over here as back home," I said. ~ China Mieville

I can dig my claws into the rim of a building's crown and spread my arms and feel the buffets and gouts of boisterous air and I can close my eyes and remember, for a moment, what it is to fly. ~ 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

So ... I'm the funny one? I'm the funny sidekick?
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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 don't want to be a simile anymore,' I said. I want to be a metaphor. ~ 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

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

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

When he had first started at the center, he had liked to think that he was unexpectedly cool-looking for such a job. Now he knew that he surprised no one, that no one expected scientists to look like scientists anymore. ~ China Mieville

Soon they'll be saying you're a girl ate what was given her. ~ China Mieville

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

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

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

These felt very much like last moments. ~ China Mieville

Jeff VanderMeer's fiction has always been entrancingly, engagingly, enthusiastically weird, a winning combination of mimesis and the fantastical that privileges neither component: perhaps the very definition of that mode categorized as the 'New Weird' and exemplified most famously by the groundbreaking work of China Mieville. ~ Paul Di Filippo

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

Interstiality is a theme that is simultaneously genuinely interesting and potentially quite useful, and also a terrible cliché, so if you're going to use it, it helps to be at least respectfully skeptical about the wilder claims of its theoretical partisans, I think. ~ 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

London is an endless skirmish between angles and emptiness. ~ 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

In August 1914, the name of St Petersburg itself is changed to the more Slavonic Petrograd: in semiotic rebellion against this idiocy, the local Bolsheviks continue to style themselves the 'Petersburg Committee'. ~ 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

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

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

A few mad exaggerations, alright, within a couple of days: swear to fucking god, they were like throwing grenades and pulling out all kinds of crazy knackery, it was out of control. Whatever. As if the story, if big enough, reflected glory on the teller. ~ China Mieville

Isaac liked the idea of an inter-aspectual entity so enamored with knowledge that it just roamed from realm to realm in a bath, murmuring with interest at everything it came across. ~ 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

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

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

But pass through Copula Hall and she or he might leave Beszel, and at the end of the hall come back to exactly (corporeally) where they had just been, but in another country, a tourist, a marvelling visitor, to a street that shared the latitude-longitude of their own address, a street they had never visited before, whose architecture they had always unseen, to the Ul Qoman house sitting next to and a whole city away from their own building, unvisible there now they had come through, all the way across the Breach, back home. ~ 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

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

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

I don't like allegory. ~ 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

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

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

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

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

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? ~ China Mieville

A plague of ennui afflicted London's many prophets. Warning signs were discarded, pamphlets pulped, megaphones thrown into cupboards. Those who could count questionable presences insisted that even since the Architeuthis had disappeared, something new had been walking. Something driven and intense and intent on itself. And since shortly after that, it had unfolded again and become something a little more itself, emerged from a pupa of unspecificity
into sentience, a obsessive moment of now that trod heavy in time.
No, they didn't really know what that mean, either, but that was their very strong impression. And it was freaking them out. ~ China Mieville

Why's there a pharos here?" he said. "You don't put a lighthouse where no one's going to go. You put it somewhere dangerous where they have to go. ~ China Mieville

From that historically brief quite opaque moment, came the chaos of our material history, an anarchy of chronology, of mismatched remnants that delighted and horrified investigators. ~ 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

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

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

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

A blast, an acceleration, the distillate, the spirit, the history, the weaponized soul of convulsive beauty went critical. ~ 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

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

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

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

Pipes filled with brine that spied on the inhabitants of buildings watching, listening, hunting. You might obscure the attention of the Londonmancers, with the complicity of a treacherous borough, with strikebreaking hexes strong enough: but nothing could stay hidden from an inquisitive sea. ~ China Mieville

Like some waterhole in the veldt, she though unclearly, where the weak and the strong and predatory drink together in a truce: the gazelle, the wildebeest, the mafadet, and the lion. All the possibilities lined up together in fucking harmony, and the winner, the strongest, the fact, the real, letting the others that have failed live, letting them all live. Pacifist and pathetic. ~ China Mieville

It had become a chimney poking from a vertical universe of bookshelves.
There was motion below her. There were people on the shelves.
They clung to the edges of the cases and moved across them in expert scuttles. They wore ropes and hooks and carried picks on which they sometimes hung. Dangling from straps they carried notebooks, pens, magnifying glasses, ink pads, and stamps.
The men and women took books from the shelves as they went, checked their details, leaning against their ropes, replaced them, pulled out little pads and made notes, sometimes carried the books with them to another place and reshelved it there.
...
I'm Margarita Staples. She bowed in her harness. 'Extreme librarian. Bookaneer. ~ China Mieville

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

There's something intrinsically radical about the fantastic aesthetic - starting from the premise that the impossible is true, attempting to undermine expectations. ~ China Mieville

'Kraken' is set in London and has a lot of London riffs, but I think it's more like slightly dreamlike, slightly abstract London. It's London as a kind of fantasy kingdom. ~ China Mieville

Everything's fit to be worshipped. ~ China Mieville

I think science fiction is very bad at prediction. ~ 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

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

The air was stained by shadows, a darkness burst by lightning like camera flashes. ~ China Mieville

Houses built on bridges are scandals. 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. But someone had built on this bridge, drawn attention to its matter and failure. An arrogance that thrilled me. ~ China Mieville

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

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

If the fucking Scar exists," whispered the Brucolac, still without turning, "and if they get us there and by some gods-fucked miracle we survive, then they'll still destroy us. We are not an expeditionary force; we are not on some fucking quest. This is a city, Uther. We live; we buy; we sell; we steal; we trade. We are a port. This is not about adventures." He turned and faced Uther Doul with his eyes caustic. "You know that. That's why you came here, dammit, Uther. Because you were sick of adventures. ~ China Mieville

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

The return to anywhere you last visited as a child is difficult, especially when it's a door. Your heart beats harder when you knock. ~ 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

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

They live beyond the quick ghetto. In hovels. In the shantytown.' He smiled. 'And every night, after the sun's descended, they can crawl safely out from their shacks and shuffle into the town. Stick-figures in rags, leaning against the walls. Exhausted and starving, hands outstretched. Begging.' His voice was soft and vicious. 'Begging for the quick to take pity on them. And every so often one of us will acquiesce, and out of pity and contempt, embarrassed by our soft philanthropy, we'll stand in the eaves of a building and offer up our wrists. And you and your kind will open them, all frantic with hunger and fawning with gratitude, and take a few eager swigs, till we decide you've had enough and take back our hands while you weep and beg for more, and maybe spew because you've gone without a hit so long your stomach can't handle what it craves, and we leave you lying in the dirt, blissed by your little fix. ~ China Mieville

There was a time when wen we did not form all our words as we do now, in writing on a page. There was a time when the word "&" was written with several distinct & separate letters. It seems madness now. But there it is, & there is nothing we can do about it.

Humanity learned to ride the rails, & that motion made us what we are, a ferromaritime people. The lines of the railsea go everywhere but from one place straight to another. It is always switchback, junction, coils around & over our own train-trails.

What word better could there be to symbolize the railsea that connects & separates all lands, than "&" itself? Where else does the railsea take us, but to one place & that one & that one & that one, & so on? & what better embodies, in the sweep of the pen, the recurved motion of trains, than "&"?

An efficient route from where we start to where we end would make the word the tiniest line. But it takes a veering route, up & backwards, overshooting & correcting, back down again south & west, crossing its own earlier path, changing direction, another overlap, to stop, finally, a few hairs' width from where we began.

& tacks & yaws, switches on its way to where it's going, as we all must do. ~ China Mieville

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

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

I do not dream, der Grimnebulin. I am a calculating machine that has calculated how to think. I do not dream. I have no neuroses, no hidden depths. My consciousness is a growing function of my processing power, not the baroque thing that sprouts from your mind, with its hidden rooms in attics and cellars. ~ China Mieville

I turn away from him and step into the vastness of New Crobuzon, this towering edifice of architecture and history, this complexitude of money and slum, this profane steam-powered god. I turn and walk into the city my home, not bird or garuda, not miserable crossbreed.
I turn and walk into my home, the city, a man. ~ 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

None of us have to obey instructions. I consider my own existence proof of that. So much of life is cobbled together when plans go awry. That is often where happiness comes from. ~ China Mieville

Your job is to get villains. Right? You'll have to know what to do. If you don't know, you have to find out. If you can't find out you bloody well make it up and then you make it so. ~ China Mieville

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

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

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

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

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

'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

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

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

He was cheered by this. He was a scientist, not a mystic. ~ 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

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