Top 70 China Miéville Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “My Google-fu is strong.”

— China Miéville

2. “A trap is only a trap if you don’t know about it. If you know about it, it’s a challenge.”

— China Miéville

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

— China Miéville

4. “Loads of children read books about dinosaurs, underwater monsters, dragons, witches, aliens, and robots. Essentially, the people who read SF, fantasy and horror haven’t grown out of enjoying the strange and weird.”

— China Miéville

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

— China Miéville

6. “Any moment called NOW is always full of possibles.”

— China Miéville

7. “The dead are way more organized than the living.”

— China Miéville

8. “I couldn’t tell if I was perspicacious or paranoid.”

— China Miéville

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

— China Miéville

10. “So long as it fated, fate didn’t care what it fated.”

— China Miéville

11. “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.”

— China Miéville

12. “I’m a science fiction and fantasy geek.”

— China Miéville

13. “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.”

— China Miéville

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

— China Miéville

15. “In time, in time they tell me, I’ll not feel so bad. I don’t want time to heal me. There’s a reason I’m like this. I want time to set me ugly and knotted with loss of you, marking me. I won’t smooth you away. I can’t say goodbye.”

— China Miéville

16. “Fantasy and science fiction can be literal as well as allegorical and there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a monster like a giant squid for what it is, as well as searching for metaphor.”

— China Miéville

17. “Anything for gold and experience.”

— China Miéville

18. “London is an endless skirmish between angles and emptiness.”

— China Miéville

19. “Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they’re amiable and sometimes not.”

— China Miéville

20. “The summer stretched out the daylight as if on a rack. Each moment was drawn out until its anatomy collapsed. Time broke down. The day progressed in an endless sequence of dead moments.”

— China Miéville

21. “Sometimes translation stops you understanding.”

— China Miéville

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

— China Miéville

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

— China Miéville

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

— China Miéville

25. “I’d never understood the injunction not to regret anything, couldn’t see how that wasn’t cowardice...”

— China Miéville

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

— China Miéville

27. “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.”

— China Miéville

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

— China Miéville

29. “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 Miéville

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

— China Miéville

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

— China Miéville

32. “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.”

— China Miéville

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

— China Miéville

34. “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 Miéville

35. “Dismissing fantasy writing because some of it is bad is exactly like saying I’m not reading Jane Eyre because it is a romance and I know romance is crap.”

— China Miéville

36. “It had not been a long journey, but the memory of it filled her like an infection. She had felt tethered by time to the city behind her, so that the minutes stretched out taut as she moved away, and slowed the farther she got, dragging out her little voyage.”

— China Miéville

37. “I think science fiction is very bad at prediction.”

— China Miéville

38. “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.”

— China Miéville

39. “I’m a very friendly socialist.”

— China Miéville

40. “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.”

— China Miéville

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

— China Miéville

42. “I’ll never be a minimalist. The fact that the prose is more tightly controlled doesn’t for a minute mean that it’s minimalist. I very much like arcane words and baroque sentence structure.”

— China Miéville

43. “In the deepest places, where physical norms collapse under the crushing water, bodies still fall softly through the dark, days after their vessels have capsized. They decay on their long journey down. Nothing will hit the black sand at the bottom of the world but algae-covered bones.”

— China Miéville

44. “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.”

— China Miéville

45. “Fantastic fiction covers fantasy, horror and science fiction – and it doesn’t get the attention it deserves from the literati.”

— China Miéville

46. “Ever since I was two, I’ve loved octopuses, monsters, abandoned buildings.”

— China Miéville

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

— China Miéville

48. “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.”

— China Miéville

49. “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.”

— China Miéville

50. “One of the things that I love so much about fantasy and science fiction is that the weirdness that it creates is always at its best completely its own end and also metaphorically and symbolically laden.”

— China Miéville