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PEOPLE HAVE WANTED TO narrate since first we banged rocks together & wondered about fire. There’ll be tellings as long as there are any of us here, until the stars disappear one by one like turned-out lights.

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
Stars
Banged
People
Light
Wondered
Together
Lights
Wanted
Disappear
Firsts
Turned
Rocks
First
Fire
Long
Since
Narrate
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The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back.
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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.
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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.
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Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and sometimes not.
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A sickly little smile grew and died on his mouth like a fungus.
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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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So long as it fated, fate didn't care what it fated.
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Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole.
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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.
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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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My sustenance is information. My interventions are hidden. I increase as I learn. I compute, so I am.
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I couldn't tell if I was perspicacious or paranoid.
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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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Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.
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The problem with most genre fantasy is that it's not nearly fantastic enough. It's escapist, but it can't escape.
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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.
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In every book I write, I try to name-check the most prominent influences, or the most prominent conscious influences.
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I remember vividly what it's like to read as a 10-year-old - that passionate inhabiting of a book.
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Anything for gold and experience.
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