China Mieville Quotes

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

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.

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.

Any moment called NOW is always full of possibles.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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 think science fiction is very bad at prediction.

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

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.

Remember the movements that don't look like moving.

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.

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

I don't like allegory.

I love it when people want to interpret my books.

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

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

Anything for gold and experience.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

I'm a science fiction and fantasy geek.

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.

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.

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

London is an endless skirmish between angles and emptiness.

I'm a very friendly socialist.

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

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

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.

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.