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We Speak Now Or I Do, And Others Do. You've Never Spoken Before. You Will. You'll Be Able To Say How The City Is A Pit And A Hill And A Standard And An Animal That Hunts And A Vessel On The Sea And The Sea And How We Are Fish In It, Not Like The Man Who Swims Weekly With Fish But The Fish With Which He Swims, The Water, The Pool. I Love You, You Light Me, Warm Me, You Are Suns. You Have Never Spoken Before.

-China Mieville

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We Speak Now Or

China Mieville

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We Speak Now Or I Do, And Others Do. You've Never Spoken Before. You Will. You'll Be Able To Say How The City Is A Pit And A Hill And A Standard And An Animal That Hunts And A Vessel On The Sea And The Sea And How We Are Fish In It, Not Like The Man Who Swims Weekly With Fish But The Fish With Which He Swims, The Water, The Pool. I Love You, You Light Me, Warm Me, You Are Suns. You Have Never Spoken Before.

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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.

No One Ever Got Into Science Fiction For The Sex Or Prestige. They Got Into It Because They Love It.

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.

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.

Any Moment Called Now Is Always Full Of Possibles.

We Should Have Just Killed Him, That's A Lesson, Don't Get Creative With Revenge

My Sustenance Is Information. My Interventions Are Hidden. I Increase As I Learn. I Compute, So I Am.

Anything For Gold And Experience.

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.

The Best Way To Write A Novel Is To Do It Behind Your Own Back.

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.

I Love It When People Want To Interpret My Books.

Someone Came In All Starfleet Badges Today. Not On My Shift, Sadly.' 'fascist,' Leon Had Said. 'why Are You So Prejudiced Against Nerds?' 'please,' Billy Said. 'that Would Be A Bit Self-hating, Wouldn't It?' 'yeah, But You Pass. You're Like, You're In Deep Cover,' Leon Said. 'you Can Sneak Out Of The Nerd Ghetto And Hide The Badge And Bring Back Food And Clothes And Word Of The Outside World.

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.

Books Are Always Obviously Having Conversations With Other Books, And Some Times They're Amiable And Sometimes Not.

In The Field Of Fantastic Fiction, The Question Of World-building Is Not Uncontroversial. But I Grew Up With 'dungeons And Dragons,' So That Whole World-building Thing Is Very Close To My Heart.

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.

My Job Is Not To Try To Give Readers What They Want But To Try To Make Readers Want What I Give.

For Every Action, There's An Infinity Of Outcomes. Countless Trillions Are Possible, Many Milliards Are Likely, Millions Might Be Considered Probable, Several Occur As Possibilities To Us As Observers - And One Comes True.

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.

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.

I Differ With Myself Then Agree, Like The Rock That Was Broken And Cemented Together. I Change My Opinion.

We Speak Now Or I Do, And Others Do. You've Never Spoken Before. You Will. You'll Be Able To Say How The City Is A Pit And A Hill And A Standard And An Animal That Hunts And A Vessel On The Sea And The Sea And How We Are Fish In It, Not Like The Man Who Swims Weekly With Fish But The Fish With Which He Swims, The Water, The Pool. I Love You, You Light Me, Warm Me, You Are Suns. You Have Never Spoken Before.

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.

A Sickly Little Smile Grew And Died On His Mouth Like A Fungus.

London Is An Endless Skirmish Between Angles And Emptiness.

The Problem With Most Genre Fantasy Is That It's Not Nearly Fantastic Enough. It's Escapist, But It Can't Escape.

I Have Danced With The Spider. I Have Cut A Caper With The Dancing Mad God.

Fantastic Fiction Covers Fantasy, Horror And Science Fiction - And It Doesn't Get The Attention It Deserves From The Literati.

The Weaver Is A Really Godlike Power. It's Not Even A Blind Idiot God, A Sort Of Lovecraft Thing, It's Just A Purely Capricious God. It's An Intelligence You Can't Understand, So You Can't Trust It." -amazon.com Interview

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.

A Sense Of Wrongness, Of Fraught Unease, As If Long Nails Scraped The Surface Of The Moon, Raising The Hackles Of The Soul.

Personally I Don't Like It When Writers Become Excessively Proscriptive About The Way That People Read Their Books.

In Every Book I Write, I Try To Name-check The Most Prominent Influences, Or The Most Prominent Conscious Influences.

There Is No Knowing Beyond That Membrane, The Meniscus Of Death. What Can Be Seen From Here Is Distorted, Refracted. All We Can Know Are Those Untrustworthy Glimpses--that And Rumour. The Prattle. The Dead Gossip: It Is The Reverberation Of That Gossip Against The Surface Tension Of Death That The Better Mediums Hear. It Is Like Listening To Whispered Secrets Through A Toilet Door. It Is A Crude And Muffled Susurrus.

I'm A Very Friendly Socialist.

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.

I Like The Idea Of Trying To Write A Book In Every Genre.

So Long As It Fated, Fate Didn't Care What It Fated.

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.

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.

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.

I Think Science Fiction Is Very Bad At Prediction.

Science Fiction

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I'll Tell You, I've Never Particularly Been A Trek Person. I Feel About Trek The Way One Feels About Known, Vaguely Liked, But Rather Distant Members Of One's Family.

In The Deepest Places, Where Physical Norms Collapse Under The Crushing Water, Bodies Still Fall Softly Through The Dark, Days After Their Vessels Have Capsized. They Decay On Their Long Journey Down. Nothing Will Hit The Black Sand At The Bottom Of The World But Algae-covered Bones.

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.

Word Spread Because Word Will Spread. Stories And Secrets Fight, Stories Win, Shed New Secrets, Which New Stories Fight, And On.

Remember The Movements That Don't Look Like Moving.

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I'd Never Understood The Injunction Not To Regret Anything, Couldn't See How That Wasn't Cowardice.

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I Feel Fantastically Geeky. [but] I'm Not One Of Those People Who's Enormously Proud Of Being A Geek, But Nor Am I Particularly Ashamed Of It.

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.

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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.

Actions Have Consequences

A Trap Is Only A Trap If You Don't Know About It. If You Know About It, It's A Challenge.

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.

My Google-fu Is Strong.

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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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I Don't Like Allegory.

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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.

Ever Since I Was Two, I've Loved Octopuses, Monsters, Abandoned Buildings.

Is It More Childish And Foolish To Insist That There Is A Conspiracy Or That There Is Not?

The Dead Are Way More Organized Than The Living.

Scars Are Memory. Like Sutures. They Stitch The Past To Me.

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.

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I'd Never Been To A Science-fiction Convention Until I Became A Professional Writer.

Science Fiction

Perhaps The Window Is Not A Sun But An Asterisk, Interrupting The Grammar Of The Sky, With Me Sitting Below It Like A Footnote.

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.

I'm A Science Fiction And Fantasy Geek.

A Scholar Can Never Let Mere Wrongness Get In The Way Of The Theory.

I Couldn't Tell If I Was Perspicacious Or Paranoid.

Everything Has Changed. I Cannot Be Used Anymore. Those Days Are Over. I Know Too Much. What I Do Now, I Do For Me.

...where's The Skill In Being A Hero If You Were Always Destined To Do It?

Scars Are Not Injuries, Tanner Sack. A Scar Is A Healing. After Injury, A Scar Is What Makes You Whole.

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