China Mieville quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by China Mieville

China Mieville Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from China Mieville on Wise Famous Quotes.

...terrorism could not win once the real terror went.

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

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

I don't like allegory.

Remember the movements that don't look like moving.

In the right context you can make words do all kinds of things.

Standing there on his new perch, Sham was overwhelmingly bored of feeling overwhelmed. The more he worked, he realized, the quicker he worked.

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.

That's what gets converts these days," Baron said. "It's a buyers' market in apocalypse. What's hot in heresy's Armageddon.

There are no telepaths in this universe, I think, but there are empathics, with languages so silent that they may as well be sharing thoughts.

Come on then," Deeba said. "We haven't got time to waste. You're not the ones who are going to get forgot in a few days' time if you don't phone home.

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

As he got older, Billy suspected, he would, Dicaprio-like, simply become like an increasingly wizened child.

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

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

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

I don't want to be a simile anymore,' I said. I want to be a metaphor.

Sometimes I'd go to his house. If I had some cool cards in my pack of Iceberg Updates, we'd compare collections, maybe swap a few.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UnLondon would have to look after itself. She wasn't the Shwazzy. She was just someone. How could just someone be any help, whatever was going on?

Anything for gold and experience.

This gentleman is cactus," said Doul.

Just her, three men, a fidgety pig and lawful intent.

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

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

I'm a very friendly socialist.

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

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

When the rich grow afraid, they get nasty.

A classic unspoken agreement among escapees from a small town: don't look back, don't be each other's anchors, no nostalgia.

These felt very much like last moments.

We have to establish our credentials as an explorocracy; so to survive and rule ourselves, we have to explore.

Once I said to my father, 'Why do you want me?'
I still think that's the bravest thing I've ever done.

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

He knows religion is bollocks," Collingswood said. "He just wishes he didn't.

The unwritten novel has a basilisk's stare.

The aim of a PhD's to ensure that no one, including your advisor, understands what you're doing after the first couple of years.

My Google-fu is strong.

The light was going: some cloud cover arriving, as if summoned by drama.

I mean course you want a change, we want a change, but if a change ain't godsdamn coming, then the next thing I wish is that I didn't care.

Only humans dread. Dread is appropriate to nothing. It's the surplus of animal fear, it's never indicated, it's nothing but itself.

But this was not quite the right kraken apocalypse.

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

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.

They hammered it with sometimes-guns, that violently assert the manchmal, this stuff, our everyday, against the always of the immer.

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

He said, You'll write it not because there's no possibility it'll be found but because it costs too much to not write it.

Shadows fell on them like predators as the light went out.

Surrealism comes for us all, Thibaut thinks.

I love monsters.

History seemed meaningless here, or at least bewildered.

Cooking and eating were growing to irritate her with their relentless necessity.

Fortune-telling was quantum betting, a competitive scrying of variably likely outcomes.

Sometimes translation stops you understanding.

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

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

There were times, Sham felt, when the captains regretted there being only two types of limb they could lose to their obsessions.

Everything's fit to be worshipped.

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

I have some gold. I will interest you. Pity me. I beg you to help me.

A promise fulfilled may be a classic moment, but prophecies mean anticlimax. How much more awesome was an unexpected salvation?

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

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.

Devils and Nazis don't work well together.

I think science fiction is very bad at prediction.

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.

Death isn't what it used to be

At dawn a great shark mouth appears at the horizon smiling like a stupid angel and chewing silently on the sky. Women

I love you, you light me, warm me, you are suns.

You'd love a bit of pomp: that way in later years you might invoke end-of-empire ghosts.

Any moment called now is always full of possibles.

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

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

The one that goes: I'd like to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather. Not screaming in terror like his passengers.

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

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.

It ain't that he's not interested in, like, persuasiveness, get me? He's interested in it. Like something in a jar.

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

We could take his gag away, thought Isaac, and he wouldn't scream ... but then he might speak ... He left the gag in place.

Vessels knocked together for hour upon hour, like bones, like someone infinitely stupid and patient at the door of an empty house.

If you didn't know, you wouldn't take him for part-ghost - but you'd know he wanted to be somewhere else.

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

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

I'm a science fiction and fantasy geek.

London is an endless skirmish between angles and emptiness.

This is kraken year zero," Moore said. "This is Anno Teuthis. We're in the end times. What d'you think's been going on?

Of all the skills necessary for her work, what she was perhaps worst at was being polite to inanimate things.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Heaven might not be what everyone thinks it is, but that don't mean it's a myth.

The Canadians had Terrell. He was uninfected, in quarantine, and knew nothing.