Quotes from China Mieville

As well as being a fascist, he's just not very clever

Woof," the dogman Nazi said.

their officer. The acid and powder in the

Officers looked at the antique once-animals that eyed them back, at the no giant tank, at the nowhere anything so big and missing as Architeuthis could be.

There were those Hosts who thought something better could have been said and better thoughts therefore thought, had I only been made to do other things than I had. That I could have been a better simile for those in need of one to speak precisely; to speak about those somethings other than me that I was—they would have asserted— like. But those critics of course couldn't say what those thoughts would have been, because they could not have them.

The fucking angels of memory were out. They had come out of their museums, out of their castles. They'd gone to war against whatever this incoming to-come was. The very facts of retrospection and fate that had various sides fighting were now out themselves, personified or apotheosed and smacking seven bells out of each other directly No longer solely reasons, justifications, teloi, casus belli for others to invoke or believe in: now combatants. The war had just got meta.

But sharing has its limits. It might make you famous, but chances are it won't earn you a buck. It might find you new people to connect with, but it won't make it any easier to click with them. And it might let you tell the world what's on your mind; but it won't make the world listen.

Anyway, half of them are police agents. It's the first principle, isn't it? Whoever's arguing fiercest for violence is the cop.

I have mixed feelings about zoos. Some days, it makes me sad to see animals in confined habitats, under constant observation by an alien species. Other days, I see the amount of care and love provided by the zookeepers; I remember how dangerous the wild is, particularly for endangered animals. I tear up a little when I see a kid staring at some weird creature from another continent – I know that kid is going to learn everything about that animal, and love it, and fight for its survival.

Why does everything have to be put into boxes?" they say. & fair enough, up to a point. But this vigorous drive to divide, subdivide & label has been rather maligned. Such conceptual shuffling is inevitable, & a reasonable defence against what would otherwise face us as thoroughgoing chaos.

Why should we not shep naches from the accomplishments of our machines? This vicarious joy or success sounds somewhat odd, but it shouldn't be. We get excited when our sports team wins a game; why should it disturb or disappoint us when our creations turn out to be more accomplished than ourselves?

This is kraken year zero," Moore said. "This is Anno Teuthis. We're in the end times. What d'you think's been going on?

I 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

How could one not think of the stories we all grew up on, that surely the Ul Qomans grew up on too? Ul Qoman man and Bes? maid, meeting in the middle of Copula Hall, returning to their homes to realise that they live, grosstopically, next door to each other, spending their lives faithful and alone, rising at the same time, walking crosshatched streets close like a couple, each in their own city, never breaching, never quite touching, never speaking a word across the border.

sometimes-guns, that violently assert the manchmal, this stuff, our everyday, against the always of the immer.

The children from the bridge were often waiting there, eyeing me. They congregated by the stump and played a game involving motions as strange as those of worship. To me it looked as if they were feeling the missing bark for handholds, as if it were an expertise of town children that they could climb ghost trees.

It's shocking how fast a whole city can be made to change. Trade, all the moments and minutiae of exchange: knowledge, services, goods, promises and extras. Our culture. The way we lived. All of those things had to be fixed.

The branches dropped shaggy creepers that, when they reached the earth, hardened into roots and pried apart paving.

That," she says, "is what I am. I am what's been sent for.

It's a chain of whispers," he said. He leaned in and spoke quietly, ensuring that our conversation was private. "When they tell you that I came from the world of the dead, you're at the end of a chain of whispers. Each link has an imperfect join with those around it, and meaning leaches out between them." If

Sometimes he opened books and found words that had defeated him the first time he had seen them, and that he had then written down and learned. It delighted him. He felt like a fox that had tracked them. That was how it was with thorough, and climber, and khepri. When he encountered them for the second time, they surrendered to him, and he read them without pause. In

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

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

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