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China Miéville
143 quotes
“I am often asked is [my work] science fiction or fantasy and my answer is usually ‘Yes’.”
China Miéville (born 1972) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In a panel about his work in Comic Con 2010. Quoted in China Miéville Takes Comic Con.
“The reason that I like SF and fantasy and horror is that to me it's the pulp wing of surrealism.”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That’s the trouble with trying to counter clichés—the counterclichés cliché quicker than shit off a shovel, and with that comes domestication. Either you lose any subversive gloss at all—the hip-hop which now sells us jeans and cheese once fought the power—or, what’s perhaps worse, a horrible zombie gloss of radicalism is retained while you shuffle into the corridors of establishment, rotting.”
China Miéville (born 1972) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: New Weird, in Jack Dann (ed.), Nebula Awards Showcase 2005 (2005), pp. 50-51
“New Weird—along with the other mo(ve)ments of which it’s some kind of cousin, the Ratbastards, the Interstitial Arts, the New Space Opera and others—reflected a major cultural shake-up. Soon, though, if not already, those groups will have their epigones, and will probably be the very fantasy mainstream they were railing against. At which point, doubtless, some new punkass radicals will come along and subvert us all, by writing about hobbits.”
China Miéville (born 1972) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: New Weird, in Jack Dann (ed.), Nebula Awards Showcase 2005 (2005), p. 51
“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.”
China Miéville (born 1972) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On winning the Hugo Award in 2010, asked in a conference in France
“Socialism and SF are the two most fundamental influences in my life.”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1972) first seen 2012 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: China Mieville: "My job is not to try to give readers what they want...", theguardian.com, Thursday 20 September, 2012.
“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 Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s the first principle, isn’t it? Whoever’s arguing fiercest for violence is the cop.”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This was not the time for rage but for politics and strategy.”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You didn’t know, but not knowing is no excuse.”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What if the chosen one misunderstands what he’s been chosen for?”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Across the globe, in dark places of the earth, secret lairs were rarely caves of monsters or marvels but markets. Shops. The worst-kept secret in circulation was that certain activities invested items in their proximity with certain affects, effects, and powers, and made them hugely valuable. And that thus it was imperative that they be sold. That, certainly, had been the case for as long as there had been people and things, but there were always fluctuations. The occult economies of charged items were always jostling.”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Lists make magic, the rhythm of itemized words: you do not list ten techniques, numbered and chantable, in austere prose appropriate for some early-millennium rebooted Book of Thoth, and not know that you have written an incantation.”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Abomination from one perspective, it was advertising copy from another.”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Koning was a self-made expert. She snuggled what she’d bought in the nest she had made of shredded grimoires and scrunched-up rules of engagement. She watched it. It did nothing.”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Metamorphosis is death. Inside a pupa larval flesh breaks down utterly, as if in chemical spill. Eyes do not become other eyes nor mouthparts mouths. All parts are lost in a reconfiguring slop, as absolutely formless as a salted slug, that ex liquid nihilo self-organizes into a quite other animal. A cocoon is not a transformation pod but an execution chamber, one that doubles as a birthplace, and is parsimonious with matter.”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Koning’s skills were adequate, her calculations plausible enough, that the plans were hubristic but not quite mad.”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The priest was nodding as he sang. I remembered his anger. I remembered when his companion said, “Bastards,” and I realized I didn’t know if she meant the godnappers, or the gods who’d let themselves be taken, who’d let everyone down.”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Joanna took Mel to Dresden, to the Frauenkirche. The timed their visit to coincide with a monthly English evensong. “Firebombs not enough?” Mel whispered. “Now we inflict Anglicanism on them?”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Annalise’s fantasies involve disappearance. She catastrophizes all the time, and makes things worse than they need to be by doing so.”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She knows most of this, to some extent, and she knows she’s depressed, but if knowing the problem was the solution, most patients wouldn’t need us at all.”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Do you even know why you’re angry with me?” Simone shouted. “Oh, I’ll figure something out,” Tova said.”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You were sick of sentimentality, of the moralism, maneuvering, and malice that comes with it.”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We know the axes on which we should judge, and age has never been one.”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That was a salvo of something against something.”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I told myself I had no choice but in a situation like that the choice you have is how you go about not having a choice.”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How is it appropriate to feel? she thought. Only humans dread. Dread is appropriate to nothing. It’s the surplus of animal fear, it’s never indicated, it’s nothing but itself.”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They think I’m old-fashioned? Is being against racism and hatred old-fashioned? OK, I’m old-fashioned.”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Moral your artistic proclivities are not, nor fitting for a physician, though I won’t deny the skill in them. They are, I will say it, unnatural.”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was an unusually hot afternoon. One of those days all slowly ambling bumblebees and honeysuckle and so forth, at which the English countryside, when it puts its mind to it, excels, and quite unlike any summer day anywhere else. Calm and still and lovely, but never without a sense of something impending. The sort of day one misses even as one experiences it.”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Veldt to scrub to fields to farms to these first tumbling houses that rise from the earth. It has been night for a long time. The hovels that encrust the river’s edge have grown like mushrooms around me in the dark. We rock. We pitch in a deep current.”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The water here reflects the stars through a stinking rainbow of impurities, effluents and chymical slop, making it sluggish and unsettling. (Oh, to rise above this to not smell this filth this dirt this dung to not enter the city through this latrine but I must stop, I must, I cannot go on, I must.)”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My cloak (heavy cloth unfamiliar and painful on my skin) tugs at me and I can feel the weight of my purse. That is what protects me here; that and the illusion I have fostered, the source of my sorrow and my shame, the anguish that has brought me to this great wen, this dusty city dreamed up in bone and brick, a conspiracy of industry and violence, steeped in history and battened-down power, this badland beyond my ken.”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mercantile law ruled: let the buyer beware.”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She was an artist. Her circle were the libertines, the patrons and the hangers-on, bohemians and parasites, poets and pamphleteers and fashionable junkies. They delighted in the scandalous and the outre. [...] Her love-life was an avant-garde transgression, an art-happening, like Concrete Music had been last season, or ‘Snot Art! the year before that.”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He was, after all, the scientist-outcast, the disreputable thinker who walked out of a lucrative teaching post to engage in experiments too outrageous and brilliant for the tiny minds who ran the university. What did he care for convention? He would sleep with whomever and whatever he liked, surely!”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But Isaac’s research-unchanged in its aims over all those years-could not proceed in a vacuum. He had to publish. He had to debate. He had to argue, to attend conferences-as the rogue, the rebellious son. There were great advantages to renegacy.”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To cross-love openly would be a quick route to pariah status, rather than the bad-boy chic he had assiduously courted. What scared him was not that the editors of the journals and the chairs of the conferences and the publishers would find out about Lin and him. What scared him was that he be seen not trying to hide it. If he went through the motions of a cover-up, they could not denounce him as beyond the pale.”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The sun shifted above them, sending shadows of the window-pane and clouds moving uneasily through the room. The lovers did not notice the day move.”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I see clearly as you, clearer. For you it is undifferentiated. In one corner a slum collapsing, in another a new train with pistons shining, in another a gaudy painted lady below a drab and ancient airship... You must process as one picture. What chaos! Tells you nothing, contradicts itself, changes its story. For me each tiny part has integrity, each fractionally different from the next, until all variation is accounted for, incrementally, rationally.”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Faint cries and industrial drones sounded from dark windows set into its brick banks, some of them below the high-water mark. Prisons and torture-chambers and workshops, and their bastard hybrids, the punishment factories, where the condemned were Remade.”
China Miéville (born 1972) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source