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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 Mieville
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China Mieville
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: September 6
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Norwich
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China Tom Miéville
China Mieville
China Tom Mieville
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More quotes by China Mieville
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 Mieville
When I'm writing a book, generally I start with the mood and setting, along with a couple of specific imagesthings 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.
China Mieville
My sustenance is information. My interventions are hidden. I increase as I learn. I compute, so I am.
China Mieville
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.
China Mieville
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.
China Mieville
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.
China Mieville
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 Mieville
My dad hates umbrellas, said Deeba, swinging her own. When it rains he always says the same thing. 'I do not believe the presence of moisture in the air is sufficient reason to overturn society's usual sensible taboo against wielding spiked clubs at eye level.
China Mieville
I remember vividly what it's like to read as a 10-year-old - that passionate inhabiting of a book.
China Mieville
I'd never been to a science-fiction convention until I became a professional writer.
China Mieville
Remember the movements that don't look like moving.
China Mieville
Personally I don't like it when writers become excessively proscriptive about the way that people read their books.
China Mieville
I love it when people want to interpret my books.
China Mieville
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 Mieville
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.
China Mieville
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.
China Mieville
A sense of wrongness, of fraught unease, as if long nails scraped the surface of the moon, raising the hackles of the soul.
China Mieville
In every book I write, I try to name-check the most prominent influences, or the most prominent conscious influences.
China Mieville
Socialism and SF are the two most fundamental influences in my life.
China Mieville
I differ with myself then agree, like the rock that was broken and cemented together. I change my opinion.
China Mieville