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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
Interesting
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Self
Touch
Real
Awareness
Much
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Failure
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Overwrought
Quality
Prose

More quotes by China Mieville

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The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back.
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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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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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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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So long as it fated, fate didn't care what it fated.
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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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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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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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I remember vividly what it's like to read as a 10-year-old - that passionate inhabiting of a book.
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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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I differ with myself then agree, like the rock that was broken and cemented together. I change my opinion.
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London is an endless skirmish between angles and emptiness.
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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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Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.
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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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Remember the movements that don't look like moving.
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For every action, there's an infinity of outcomes. Countless trillions are possible, many milliards are likely, millions might be considered probable, several occur as possibilities to us as observers - and one comes true.
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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'm a very friendly socialist.
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