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

China Mieville

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China Mieville
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: September 6
Academic
Anthropologist
Blogger
Fantasy Author
Literary Critic
Novelist
Political Scientist
Politician
Writer
Norwich
Norfolk
China Tom Miéville
China Mieville
China Tom Mieville
Times
Book
Sometimes
Always
Amiable
Conversations
Obviously
Conversation
Books

More quotes by China Mieville

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Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.
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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.
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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.
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Remember the movements that don't look like moving.
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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.
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Personally I don't like it when writers become excessively proscriptive about the way that people read their books.
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When I'm writing a book, generally I start with the mood and setting, along with a couple of specific images—things 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.
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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.
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I like the idea of trying to write a book in every genre.
China Mieville
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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 Mieville
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My sustenance is information. My interventions are hidden. I increase as I learn. I compute, so I am.
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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 Mieville
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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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I differ with myself then agree, like the rock that was broken and cemented together. I change my opinion.
China Mieville
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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
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The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back.
China Mieville
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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
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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
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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 Mieville
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While yes we can both agree the sudden recovery of this footage smells not a little, and that we appear to be bits of tinfoil-on-string to some malevolent government kitten, yes yes yes but, Borlu, however they've come by this evidence, this is the correct decision.
China Mieville