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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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China Mieville
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: September 6
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Norwich
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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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My dad hates umbrellas, said Deeba, swinging her own. When it rains he always says the same thing. 'I do not believe the presence of moisture in the air is sufficient reason to overturn society's usual sensible taboo against wielding spiked clubs at eye level.
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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.
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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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What I always try to do in all my books is to make the stories such that if you don't agree with me politically or you're not interested in the thematics, the story will still keep you turning the pages.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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Socialism and SF are the two most fundamental influences in my life.
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I'm a very friendly socialist.
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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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Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you whole.
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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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The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back.
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It had not been a long journey, but the memory of it filled her like an infection. She had felt tethered by time to the city behind her, so that the minutes stretched out taut as she moved away, and slowed the farther she got, dragging out her little voyage.
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I couldn't tell if I was perspicacious or paranoid.
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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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In every book I write, I try to name-check the most prominent influences, or the most prominent conscious influences.
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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