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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.

China Mieville

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

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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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Remember the movements that don't look like moving.
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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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I'd never been to a science-fiction convention until I became a professional writer.
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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 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.
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Anything for gold and experience.
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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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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.
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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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Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole.
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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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I have danced with the spider. I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god.
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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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A sickly little smile grew and died on his mouth like a fungus.
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London is an endless skirmish between angles and emptiness.
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A lot of geeks are pale, bespectacled, wear dark clothing and don't get out much - the stereotype exists because it is very often true. I could pass for a non-geek but it would be inaccurate.
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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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In every book I write, I try to name-check the most prominent influences, or the most prominent conscious influences.
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