China Miéville Quotes (102 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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Dreaded Outcome

China Miéville

China Miéville: 102 quotes 0 likes

Famous China Miéville Quotes

“Art Nouveau was coil-envy.”

China Miéville book Kraken

Kraken

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

China Miéville book Perdido Street Station

Source: Perdido Street Station

“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.”

China Miéville book The Scar

Part 6 “Morning Walker”, chapter 34 (p. 394)
Source: The Scar (2002)

“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.”

China Miéville Embassytown

Source: Embassytown (2011), Chapter "Formerly, 2"

“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.”

China Miéville

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

China Miéville Embassytown

Source: Embassytown

China Miéville Quotes about the trip

“The dead are way more organized than the living.”

China Miéville book Un Lun Dun

Source: Un Lun Dun

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

China Miéville

“The other, more nebulous, but very strong influence of RPGs was the weird fetish for systematization, the way everything is reduced to “game stats.” If you take something like Cthulhu in Lovecraft, for example, it is completely incomprehensible and beyond all human categorization. But in the game Call of Cthulhu, you see Cthulhu’s “strength,” “dexterity,” and so on, carefully expressed numerically. There’s something superheroically banalifying about that approach to the fantastic. On one level it misses the point entirely, but I must admit it appeals to me in its application of some weirdly misplaced rigor onto the fantastic: it’s a kind of exaggeratedly precise approach to secondary world creation.”

China Miéville

interview with Joan Gordon http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/interviews/mievilleinterview.htm

“I refuse to play the wink-wink-nudge-nudge game with readers. I don’t like whimsy because it doesn’t treat the fantastic seriously, and treating the fantastic seriously is one of the best ways of celebrating dialectical human consciousness there is. The one-sided celebration of the ego-driven contextually constrained instrumentally rational (as opposed to rational in a broader sense) is bureaucratic: the one-sided celebration of the subconscious, desire/fantasy driven is at best utopian, at worst sociopathic. The best fantasies—which include sf and horror—are constructed with a careful dialectic between conscious and subconscious.”

China Miéville

interview with Joan Gordon

“Judah knows the trow will be eradicated and their homes lost to history, but he will not be party to it, and he has tried to stand in its way.”

China Miéville book Iron Council

“Anamnesis” (p. 191)
Iron Council (2004)

“Now what are we looking at right here? What’s bang in the middle? Some people think that’s mathematics there. Fine. But if maths is the study that best allows you to think your way to the centre, what’re the forces you’re investigating? Maths is totally abstract, at one level, square roots of minus one and the like, but the world is nothing if not rigorously mathematical. So this is a way of looking at the world which unifies all the forces: mental, social, physical.”

China Miéville book Perdido Street Station

Source: Perdido Street Station (2000), pp. 145-146

China Miéville: Trending quotes

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

China Miéville book King Rat

Source: King Rat

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

China Miéville book The City & the City

Source: The City & the City

Books , Time

“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.”

China Miéville book The Scar

Source: The Scar

Feeling , Loss , Time

China Miéville Quotes

“So I want to have monsters as a metaphor but I also want monsters because monsters are cool.”

China Miéville

interview with 3am
Context: The thing about good pulp is that you trust the reader and you know that the mind is a machine to process metaphors so of course all those connections will be there. But you've also granted the fantastic its own dynamic and allowed that awe. There's no contradiction. So I want to have monsters as a metaphor but I also want monsters because monsters are cool. There's no contradiction.

“I refute that—I think that those are inevitable components, but it’s the surrendering to the impossible, the weird, that characterizes genre.”

China Miéville

Interview with Joan Gordon
Context: There’s simultaneously something rigorous and something playful in genre. It’s about the positing of something impossible—whether not-yet-possible or never-possible—and then taking that impossibility and granting it its own terms and systematicity. It’s carnivalesque in its impossibility and overturning of reality, but it’s rationalist in that it pretends it is real. And it’s that second element which I think those who dip their toes in the SF pond so often forget. They think sf is “about” analogies, and metaphors, and so on. I refute that—I think that those are inevitable components, but it’s the surrendering to the impossible, the weird, that characterizes genre. Those flirting with SF don’t surrender to it; they distance themselves from it, and have a neon sub-text saying, “It’s okay, this isn’t really about spaceships or aliens, it’s about real life,” not understanding that it can be both, and would do the latter better if it was serious about the former.

Thinking

“It’s about the positing of something impossible—whether not-yet-possible or never-possible—and then taking that impossibility and granting it its own terms and systematicity.”

China Miéville

“Marxism isn’t about saying you’ll get a perfect world: it’s about saying we can get a better world than this one, and it’s hard to imagine, no matter how many mistakes we make, that it could be much worse than the mass starvation, war, oppression, and exploitation we have now.”

China Miéville

interview with Joan Gordon
Context: Although we revolutionary socialists are always accused of being Utopian, nothing strikes me as more Utopian than the reformist belief that with a bit of tinkering and some good faith, we can systematically improve the world. You have to ask how many decades of broken promises and failed schemes it will take to disprove that hope. Marxism isn’t about saying you’ll get a perfect world: it’s about saying we can get a better world than this one, and it’s hard to imagine, no matter how many mistakes we make, that it could be much worse than the mass starvation, war, oppression, and exploitation we have now. In a world where 30,000 to 40,000 children die of malnutrition daily while grain ships are designed to dump food into the sea if the price dips too low, it’s worth the risk.

War , World , Imagination , Perfection

“But I prefer to think of it as a quantum Hugo and that Paolo Bacigalupi and I oscillate between between Hugo particle and wave form, this year. So it's properly science-fictional.”

China Miéville

on winning the Hugo Award in 2010, asked in a conference in France http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o70YRXlhopY&feature=related
Context: But it's a prize that... if you're into science-fiction and fantasy you grow up reading books with "Hugo [Award-winner]" on the cover. And this is very, very moving, to be in that position oneself. It's an odd situation [too], because, as you say, it was a tie, which is very rare with the Hugo, which has happened, like three times over sixty years, or something. But I prefer to think of it as a quantum Hugo and that Paolo Bacigalupi and I oscillate between between Hugo particle and wave form, this year. So it's properly science-fictional.

Thinking , Science

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

China Miéville book The Scar

Source: The Scar

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

China Miéville

Idea , Parting

“Dismissing fantasy writing because some of it is bad is exactly like saying I'm not reading Jane Eyre because it is a romance and I know romance is crap.”

China Miéville

Reading

“Art’s 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.”

China Miéville book Perdido Street Station

Source: Perdido Street Station (2000), p. 82

Art , Personality

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

China Miéville book The Scar

Source: The Scar

Memory , Past

“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.”

China Miéville book Un Lun Dun

Source: Un Lun Dun

Angels , Training

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

China Miéville

Problem

“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.”

China Miéville book Railsea

Source: Railsea

People , Star , Light

“Any moment calledis always full of possibles.”

China Miéville book Kraken

Source: Kraken

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

China Miéville book The Scar

Source: The Scar

Change

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

China Miéville book Perdido Street Station

Source: Perdido Street Station

Learning

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

China Miéville book Un Lun Dun

Source: Un Lun Dun

“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.”

China Miéville

Search , Science

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

China Miéville book Kraken

Source: Kraken

Revenge

“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 Miéville book Looking for Jake

Source: Looking for Jake and Other Stories

Sun

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

China Miéville book Perdido Street Station

Source: Perdido Street Station

Soul , Sense

“My Google-fu is strong.”

China Miéville book Kraken

Source: Kraken

Strong

“It is more foolish and childish to assume there is a conspiracy, or that there is not?”

China Miéville book The City & the City

Source: The City & the City (2009), Chapter 13 (p. 141)

“Ori supposed there were as many unspeakable stories as there were men come back from war.”

China Miéville book Iron Council

Part 4 “The Hainting”, chapter 15 (p. 314)
Iron Council (2004)

Men , War

“She shouted, “Arms and tongues, Spiral?” and waggled her arms and stuck out her tongue, and the old man crowed and did the same. “He’s for the first, against the second, as I recall,” she said to Ori. “Has he chanted for you? ‘Too much yammer, not enough hammer.’””

China Miéville book Iron Council

Part 2 “Returns”, chapter 8 (p. 85)
Iron Council (2004)

“It had some allies. Believe me, there’s nothing so terrible that someone won’t support it.”

China Miéville book Un Lun Dun

Source: Un Lun Dun (2007), Chapter 22, “History Lessons” (p. 90)

Support

“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.’”

China Miéville book Un Lun Dun

Source: Un Lun Dun (2007), Chapter 3, “The Visiting Smoke” (p. 11)

Hate

“He tried to grin but it did not go well.”

China Miéville book The City & the City

Source: The City & the City (2009), Chapter 28 (p. 297)

““History…” Jacobs spoke with terse authority. Brought Ori to a hush. “Is all full. And dripping. With the corpses. Of them who trusted the incorruptible.””

China Miéville book Iron Council

Part 4 “The Hainting”, chapter 15 (p. 319)
Iron Council (2004)

History

“Before the humans came, we didn't speak so much of certain things. Before the humans came, we didn't speak so much. Before the humans came, we didn't speak.”

China Miéville Embassytown

p 148-149
Embassytown (2011)

“Throw something away and you declare it obsolete.”

China Miéville book Un Lun Dun

Source: Un Lun Dun (2007), Chapter 12, “Safe Conduct” (p. 52)

“Andrej’s mind, like any sane human’s … was a constantly convulsing dialectical unity of consciousness and subconsciousness, the battening down and channelling of dreams and desires, the recurring re-creation of the subliminal by the contradictory, the rational-capricious ego. And vice versa. The interaction of levels of consciousness into an unstable and permanently self-renewing whole.”

China Miéville book Perdido Street Station

Source: Perdido Street Station (2000), p. 553

Dreams

“She was intelligent enough to realize that her excitement was childish, but not mature enough to care.”

China Miéville book Perdido Street Station

Source: Perdido Street Station (2000), p. 32

Intelligence

“The chief was a thuggish man: nervous, Cutter saw, because he knew he was a mediocrity become by kink of history a ruler.”

China Miéville book Iron Council

Part 3 “Wineland”, chapter 12 (p. 130)
Iron Council (2004)

History

“When the rich grow afraid, they get nasty. We say: A government for need not greed!”

China Miéville book Iron Council

“Anamnesis” (p. 222)
Iron Council (2004)

“Neither dust nor light stirred. It was as if time had been bled dry and given up.”

China Miéville book The Scar

Part 3 “The Compass Factory”, chapter 20 (p. 241)
The Scar (2002)

Light , Time

“She felt so alien, bowed under culture shock as crippling as migraine.”

China Miéville book The Scar

Part 2 “Salt”, chapter 6 (p. 78)
The Scar (2002)

“Lin realized that she was living in an unsustainable realm. It combined sanctimony, decadence, insecurity and snobbery in a weird, neurotic brew. It was parasitic.”

China Miéville book Perdido Street Station

Source: Perdido Street Station (2000), p. 188

“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.”

China Miéville book Perdido Street Station

Source: Perdido Street Station (2000), p. 607

Communication , Reality , Forgetting

“I’m not waiting to die, I don’t believe I’ll die, I am waiting for something else.
To arrive. To understand. To be at my destination.”

China Miéville book The Scar

Part 1 “Channels”, Interlude II (p. 65)
The Scar (2002)

Understanding , Waiting

“There is no theology so desperate that you can’t find it.”

China Miéville book The City & the City

Source: The City & the City (2009), Chapter 4 (p. 38)

“We’re all racing,” he said.
“Yeah, but some of us in the wrong direction.”

China Miéville book Iron Council

Part 6 “The Caucus Race”, chapter 20 (p. 364)
Iron Council (2004)

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

China Miéville

interview with Joan Gordon

Life

“We have watched mutant creatures crawl from sewers into cold flat starlight and whisper shyly to each other, drawing maps and messages in faecal mud.
I have sat with the wind at my side and seen cruel things, wicked things.
My scars and bonestubs itch. I am forgetting the weight, the sweep, the motion of wings. If I were not garuda I would pray. But I will not obeise myself before arrogant spirits.”

China Miéville book Perdido Street Station

Source: Perdido Street Station (2000), p. 51

Drawing , Forgetting

“I see echoes with lots of books in all my books, some deliberate, some unconscious until later, and as long as that is respectful I think that's great - writing on the shoulders of other writers is a privilege.”

China Miéville

China Mieville: "My job is not to try to give readers what they want..." http://www.theguardian.com/childrens-books-site/2012/sep/20/china-mieville-interview, theguardian.com, Thursday 20 September, 2012.

Books , Thinking

“The reason that I like SF and fantasy and horror is that to me it's the pulp wing of surrealism.”

China Miéville

interview with 3am