China Miéville Quotes

There wasn’t even any reasoning. Secrecy was just a bureaucrats’ reflex.

The rotting buildings lean against each other, exhausted. The river smears slime on its brick banks, city walls risen from the depths to hold the water at bay. There is a vile stink here. (I wonder how this looks from above, no chance for the city to hide then, if you came at it on the wind you would see it from miles and miles away like a dirty smear, like a slab of carrion thronging with maggots, I should not think like this but I cannot stop now, I could ride the updrafts that the chimneys vent, sail high over the proud towers and shit on the earthbound, ride the chaos, alight where I choose, I must not think like this, I must not do this now, I must stop, not now, not this, not yet.)

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

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.

I will ask you to work from life, to produce a model-life-size, I fancy-of me. Very few people see my face, Ms. Lin. A man in my position has to be careful. I’m sure you can understand. If you take this commission I will make you rich, but I will also own a part of your mind. The part that pertains to me. That is mine. I do not give you permission to share it with any. If you do, you will suffer greatly before you die.

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.

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

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.

They think I’m old-fashioned? Is being against racism and hatred old-fashioned? OK, I’m old-fashioned.

We know the axes on which we should judge, and age has never been one.

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.

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

He planned his funeral, his oration, the invitations, the snubs, but that, death itself, was always Plan B. How, he would have said to his specialists, might we bypass this unpleasantness?

It's beyond words," indeed. "There's no such thing.

Why wouldn’t the gods of the world be giant squid? What better beast? It wouldn’t take much to imagine those tentacles closing around the world, now would it?