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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.
China Mieville
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China Mieville
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: September 6
Academic
Anthropologist
Blogger
Fantasy Author
Literary Critic
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Norwich
Norfolk
China Tom Miéville
China Mieville
China Tom Mieville
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More quotes by 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
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.
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
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
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
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
Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole.
China Mieville
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.
China Mieville
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.
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
My job is not to try to give readers what they want but to try to make readers want what I give.
China Mieville
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.
China Mieville
Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.
China Mieville
I love it when people want to interpret my books.
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
Personally I don't like it when writers become excessively proscriptive about the way that people read their books.
China Mieville
A sickly little smile grew and died on his mouth like a fungus.
China Mieville
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.
China Mieville
I couldn't tell if I was perspicacious or paranoid.
China Mieville