Top 93 Quotes & Sayings by China Mieville

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

'Kraken' is set in London and has a lot of London riffs, but I think it's more like slightly dreamlike, slightly abstract London. It's London as a kind of fantasy kingdom.

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.

I love it when people want to interpret my books.

Well I don't feel sectarian against sparseness, although I sometimes get a little chippy about this. I resent the way that a certain notion of parsimony has become the norm for skilful literary writing.

I'm a very friendly socialist.

My parents went through the dictionary looking for a beautiful name, nearly called me Banyan, flicked on a few pages and came to China, which is cockney rhyming slang for mate.

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.

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

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

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

I love monsters.

I always felt sorry for the sidekick as a kid. They never got their due and it left a very bad taste in the mouth - they are defined by a subordinate relationship to someone else. I always felt like a bit of sidekick when I was a kid and it didn't feel fair.

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

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

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.

I think science fiction is very bad at prediction.

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.

'Kraken' is a very undisciplined book. That's a gamble. If it doesn't come off, it's disastrous. But there are pleasures, I think, to a meandering lack of discipline that you can't get the other way, and vice versa.

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.

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.

I don't like allegory.

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.

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

I'm a science fiction and fantasy geek.

Geeks run the world. Condoleezza Rice is a geek, Bill Gates is clearly a geek, many of the big filmmakers and writers are geeks, lots of military people are geeks. Anyone who has heard Donald Rumsfeld talk about military hardware knows they are in the presence of a geek.

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.

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.

We would never call inexplicable little insights hunches, for fear of drawing the universe's attention. But they happened, and you knew you had been in the proximity of one that had come through if you saw a detective kiss his or her fingers and touch his or her chest where a pendant to Warsha, patron saint of inexplicable inspirations, would, theoretically, hang.

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

London is an endless skirmish between angles and emptiness.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Any moment called NOW is always full of possibles.

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

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.

We speak now or I do, and others do. You've never spoken before. You will. You'll be able to say how the city is a pit and a hill and a standard and an animal that hunts and a vessel on the sea and the sea and how we are fish in it, not like the man who swims weekly with fish but the fish with which he swims, the water, the pool. I love you, you light me, warm me, you are suns. You have never spoken before.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Remember the movements that don't look like moving.

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

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.

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.

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

When I'm writing a book, generally I start with the mood and setting, along with a couple of specific images?things that have come into my head, totally abstracted from any narrative, that I've fixated on. After that, I construct a world, or an area, into which that general setting, that atmosphere, and the specific images I've focused on can fit.

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

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

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