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In every book I write, I try to name-check the most prominent influences, or the most prominent conscious influences.
China Mieville
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China Mieville
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: September 6
Academic
Anthropologist
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Fantasy Author
Literary Critic
Novelist
Political Scientist
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Norwich
Norfolk
China Tom Miéville
China Mieville
China Tom Mieville
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More quotes by China Mieville
Personally I don't like it when writers become excessively proscriptive about the way that people read their books.
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
Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.
China Mieville
Socialism and SF are the two most fundamental influences in my life.
China Mieville
I'm a very friendly socialist.
China Mieville
What I always try to do in all my books is to make the stories such that if you don't agree with me politically or you're not interested in the thematics, the story will still keep you turning the pages.
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
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
I think there's something quite interesting about the almost tragic quality of a lot of overwrought prose, because it has a much more self-conscious awareness of its own failure to touch the real.
China Mieville
Fantastic fiction covers fantasy, horror and science fiction - and it doesn't get the attention it deserves from the literati.
China Mieville
My sustenance is information. My interventions are hidden. I increase as I learn. I compute, so I am.
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
Anything for gold and experience.
China Mieville
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
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
The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back.
China Mieville
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.
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
It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.
China Mieville
The problem with most genre fantasy is that it's not nearly fantastic enough. It's escapist, but it can't escape.
China Mieville