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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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China Mieville
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: September 6
Academic
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Fantasy Author
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Novelist
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Norwich
Norfolk
China Tom Miéville
China Mieville
China Tom Mieville
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More quotes by 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
Fantastic fiction covers fantasy, horror and science fiction - and it doesn't get the attention it deserves from the literati.
China Mieville
Subby Subby Subby, whispered Goss. Keep those little bells on your slippers as quiet as you can. Sparklehorse and Starpink have managed to creep out of Apple Palace past all the monkeyfish, but if we're silent as tiny goblins we can surprise them and then all frolic off together in the Meadow of Happy Kites.
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
Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.
China Mieville
London is an endless skirmish between angles and emptiness.
China Mieville
I differ with myself then agree, like the rock that was broken and cemented together. I change my opinion.
China Mieville
There are only so many ways to experience pain. There are an almost limitless number of ways to inflict it, but the pain itself, initially vividly distinct in all its specifications, becomes, inevitably, just pain.
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
My job is not to try to give readers what they want but to try to make readers want what I give.
China Mieville
In every book I write, I try to name-check the most prominent influences, or the most prominent conscious influences.
China Mieville
I'd never been to a science-fiction convention until I became a professional writer.
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
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 Mieville
Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.
China Mieville
Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not.
China Mieville
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
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
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'm a very friendly socialist.
China Mieville
