China Mieville

I am often asked is [my work] science fiction or fantasy and my answer is usually ‘Yes’.

— China Mieville

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

— China Mieville

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.

— China Mieville

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

— China Mieville

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 Mieville

“There’s three ways not to see what you don’t want to,” she told me. “One is the coward’s way and too painful. The other is to close your eyes forever, which is the same as the first, when it comes to it. The third is the hardest and the best: you have to make sure only the things you can afford to see come before you.”

— China Mieville

You make what you see into a window, and you see what you want through it. You make what you see a sort of a door.

— China Mieville

In a newsagent’s he picked up a copy of the Standard, and hesitated by the chocolate, looking at the low-fat version he had trained himself to pretend he liked but suddenly hungry for a real bar, which with guilty devil-may-care he took and paid for.

— China Mieville

It’s the first principle, isn’t it? Whoever’s arguing fiercest for violence is the cop.

— China Mieville

This was not the time for rage but for politics and strategy.

— China Mieville

You didn’t know, but not knowing is no excuse.

— China Mieville

What if the chosen one misunderstands what he’s been chosen for?

— China Mieville

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

— China Mieville

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. 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 Mieville

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 Mieville

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 Mieville

This was the most difficult, the most extraordinary transition. Her body had been a source of shame and disgust; to engage in activities with no purpose at all except to revel in their sheer physicality had first nauseated, then terrified, and finally liberated her.

— China Mieville

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 Mieville

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 Mieville

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 Mieville

Tearfly looked at Bellis curiously, bewildered by her ignorance. She did not care. What was important to her was where she was fleeing from, not where she was, or where she was going.

— China Mieville

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 Mieville

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

— China Mieville

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

— China Mieville

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 Mieville

We say what happens now. We’re taking control. We’re turning around; we’re heading home. Your orders to proceed...are in-fucking-validated.

— China Mieville

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 Mieville

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

— China Mieville

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 Mieville

I want to know everything, he says.

— China Mieville

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

— China Mieville

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

— China Mieville

“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 Mieville

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

— China Mieville

“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 Mieville

Throw something away and you declare it obsolete.

— China Mieville

There are no cats in UnLondon, for example, because they’re not magic and mysterious at all, they’re idiots.

— China Mieville

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

— China Mieville

“Destiny’s bunk,” said the book. “That’s why this lot aren’t the Propheseers anymore.”“From here on in,” said Mortar, “we’re the Order of Suggesters.”

— China Mieville

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

— China Mieville

“She probably used proxies and a cleaner-upper online too, because there was bugger-all of interest in her cache.”“None at all. I had the techies write it all out phonetically for me.”

— China Mieville

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

— China Mieville

He tried to grin but it did not go well.

— China Mieville

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 Mieville

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 Mieville

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.

— China Mieville