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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
Anthropologist
Blogger
Fantasy Author
Literary Critic
Novelist
Political Scientist
Politician
Writer
Norwich
Norfolk
China Tom Miéville
China Mieville
China Tom Mieville
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Something
Failure

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I like the idea of trying to write a book in every genre.
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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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I have danced with the spider. I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god.
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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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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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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 sustenance is information. My interventions are hidden. I increase as I learn. I compute, so I am.
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Socialism and SF are the two most fundamental influences in my life.
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Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.
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I'm a very friendly socialist.
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If you're brave enough to try, you might be able to catch a train from UnLondon to Parisn't, or No York, or Helsunki, or Lost Angeles, or Sans Francisco, or Hong Gone, or Romeless.
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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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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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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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London is an endless skirmish between angles and emptiness.
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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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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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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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The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back.
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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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