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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.

China Mieville

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China Mieville
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: September 6
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Fantasy Author
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China Tom Miéville
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China Tom Mieville
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More quotes by China Mieville

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Fantastic fiction covers fantasy, horror and science fiction - and it doesn't get the attention it deserves from the literati.
China Mieville
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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.
China Mieville
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The problem with most genre fantasy is that it's not nearly fantastic enough. It's escapist, but it can't escape.
China Mieville
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I have danced with the spider. I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god.
China Mieville
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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.
China Mieville
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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.
China Mieville
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It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth.
China Mieville
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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.
China Mieville
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Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.
China Mieville
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Remember the movements that don't look like moving.
China Mieville
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Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole.
China Mieville
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Anything for gold and experience.
China Mieville
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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.
China Mieville
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Part of the appeal of the fantastic is taking ridiculous ideas very seriously and pretending they're not absurd.
China Mieville
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I love it when people want to interpret my books.
China Mieville
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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.
China Mieville
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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.
China Mieville
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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.
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.
China Mieville
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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