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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

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China Mieville
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: September 6
Academic
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Fantasy Author
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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

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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.
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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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I have danced with the spider. I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god.
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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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A sickly little smile grew and died on his mouth like a fungus.
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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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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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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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Socialism and SF are the two most fundamental influences in my life.
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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.
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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.
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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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One of the things that I love so much about fantasy and science fiction is that the weirdness that it creates is always at its best completely its own end and also metaphorically and symbolically laden.
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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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Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.
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I like the idea of trying to write a book in every genre.
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I couldn't tell if I was perspicacious or paranoid.
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I love it when people want to interpret my books.
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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.
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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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