China Mieville Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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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 -
“I have danced with the spider. I have cut a caper with the dancing mad god.”
-- China Mieville -
“I do, however, feel reasonably strongly the sense that the job of a piece of argumentative scholarly non-fiction is not the same as the job of a piece of fiction.”
-- China Mieville -
“Word spread because word will spread. Stories and secrets fight, stories win, shed new secrets, which new stories fight, and on.”
-- China Mieville -
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“We would never call inexplicable little insights hunches, for fear of drawing the universe's attention. But they happened, and you knew you had been in the proximity of one that had come through if you saw a detective kiss his or her fingers and touch his or her chest where a pendant to Warsha, patron saint of inexplicable inspirations, would, theoretically, hang.”
-- China Mieville -
“In every book I write, I try to name-check the most prominent influences, or the most prominent conscious influences.”
-- China Mieville -
“Personally I don't like it when writers become excessively proscriptive about the way that people read their books.”
-- 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 -
“I think the role of science fiction is not at all to prophesy. I think it is to tell interesting, vivid, strange stories that at their best are dreamlike intense versions and visions of today.”
-- China Mieville -
“I'd never been to a science-fiction convention until I became a professional writer.”
-- China Mieville -
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“I think science fiction is very bad at prediction.”
-- China Mieville -
“Fantastic fiction covers fantasy, horror and science fiction - and it doesn't get the attention it deserves from the literati.”
-- China Mieville -
“The summer stretched out the daylight as if on a rack. Each moment was drawn out until its anatomy collapsed. Time broke down. The day progressed in an endless sequence of dead moments.”
-- China Mieville -
“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.”
-- China Mieville -
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“I like the idea of trying to write a book in every genre.”
-- China Mieville -
“Ever since I was two, I've loved octopuses, monsters, abandoned buildings.”
-- China MievilleSource : "A life in writing: China Miéville" by Justine Jordan, www.theguardian.com. May 13, 2011.
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“I love it when people want to interpret my books.”
-- China Mieville -
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“I remember vividly what it's like to read as a 10-year-old - that passionate inhabiting of a book.”
-- China Mieville -
“But I do think it's important to remember that writers do not have a monopoly of wisdom on their books. They can be wrong about their own books, they can often learn about their own books.”
-- 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 MievilleSource : "China Mieville: 'My job is not to try to give readers what they want but to try to make readers want what I give' - interview". Interview with SkellieScar, www.theguardian.com. September 20, 2012.
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“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 -
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“Socialism and SF are the two most fundamental influences in my life.”
-- China Mieville -
“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 -
“My parents were hippies, and the story is that they went through a dictionary looking for a beautiful word to name me. They nearly called me Banyan, but flipped a few pages on and reached "China," thankfully. The other reason they liked it is that "china" is Cockney rhyming slang for "mate." People say "my old china," meaning "my old mate," because "china plate" rhymes with "mate.”
-- China Mieville -
“So long as it fated, fate didn't care what it fated.”
-- China Mieville -
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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 MievilleSource : Interview with SkellieScar, www.theguardian.com. September 20, 2012.
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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.”
-- China Mieville
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