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Personally I don't like it when writers become excessively proscriptive about the way that people read their books.

China Mieville

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China Mieville
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: September 6
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More quotes by 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.
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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.
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I'd never been to a science-fiction convention until I became a professional writer.
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Remember the movements that don't look like moving.
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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.
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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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My sustenance is information. My interventions are hidden. I increase as I learn. I compute, so I am.
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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.
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A sense of wrongness, of fraught unease, as if long nails scraped the surface of the moon, raising the hackles of the soul.
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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.
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The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back.
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Socialism and SF are the two most fundamental influences in my life.
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I differ with myself then agree, like the rock that was broken and cemented together. I change my opinion.
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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.
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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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My job is not to try to give readers what they want but to try to make readers want what I give.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
China Mieville