China Mieville Quotes That Are imaginative, subversive and intricate

Word spread because word will spread.

Stories and secrets fight, stories win, shed new secrets, which new stories fight, and on.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 reason that I like SF and fantasy and horror is that to me it's the pulp wing of surrealism. That's the aesthetic of undermining and creative alienation that I really go for.

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

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

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

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

Someone came in all Starfleet badges today.

Not on my shift, sadly.' 'Fascist,' Leon had said. 'Why are you so prejudiced against nerds?' 'Please,' Billy said. 'That would be a bit self-hating, wouldn't it?' 'Yeah, but you pass. You're like, you're in deep cover,' Leon said. 'You can sneak out of the nerd ghetto and hide the badge and bring back food and clothes and word of the outside world.

Loads of children read books about dinosaurs, underwater monsters, dragons, witches, aliens, and robots. Essentially, the people who read SF, fantasy and horror haven't grown out of enjoying the strange and weird.

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

Anything for gold and experience.

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.

The problem with most genre fantasy is that it's not nearly fantastic enough.

It's escapist, but it can't escape.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I don't like allegory.

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

I think the role of science fiction is not at all to prophesy. I think it is to tell interesting, vivid, strange stories that at their best are dreamlike intense versions and visions of today.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Old stories would tell how Weavers would kill each other over aesthetic disagreements, such as whether it was prettier to destroy an army of a thousand men or to leave it be, or whether a particular dandelion should or should not be plucked. For a Weaver, to think was to think aesthetically. To act - to Weave - was to bring about more pleasing patterns. They did not eat physical food: they seemed to subsist on the appreciation of beauty.

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

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.

Everything has changed. I cannot be used anymore. Those days are over. I know too much. What I do now, I do for me.

The dead are way more organized than the living.

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

I differ with myself then agree, like the rock that was broken and cemented together. I change my opinion.

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

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.

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

Any moment called NOW is always full of possibles.

Remember the movements that don't look like moving.

Fantastic fiction covers fantasy, horror and science fiction - and it doesn't get the attention it deserves from the literati.

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.

Perhaps the window is not a sun but an asterisk, interrupting the grammar of the sky, with me sitting below it like a footnote.