China Mieville Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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

Any moment called NOW is always full of possibles.

Remember the movements that don't look like moving.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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