China Mieville Quotes

I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.

Writing simply means no dependent clauses, no dangling things, no flashbacks, and keeping the subject near the predicate. We throw in as many fresh words we can get away with. Simple, short sentences don't always work. You have to do tricks with pacing, alternate long sentences with short, to keep it vital and alive.... Virtually every page is a cliffhanger--you've got to force them to turn it."~

There is something laughable about the sight of authors who enjoy the rustling folds of long and involved sentences: they are trying to cover up their feet.

Words have weight, sound and appearance; it is only by considering these that you can write a sentence that is good to look at and good to listen to.

When you are a sentence-based writer, they have to be good. They have to be really on the spot. Because when you don't have a plot, really, what shall you rely on? Just language. And sometimes I am so afraid of writing the wrong thing, I just sit and wait for the right thing to come.

I really enjoy finding the right word, creating a good, flowing sentence. I enjoy the rhythm of the words.

My sentences tend to be very short and rather spare. I'm more your paragraph kind of gal.

I know I have a problem with semi-colon abuse and have written page-long sentences. Nobody needs to be reading page-long sentences, at least not written by me.

With my fiction, I focused on chapters and overall conceptions, while in poetry, I crawled along in the trenches of each sentence, examining every word for a sign of a deeper significance.

I am gennerally understood tho I do not use that awkward squad of pointings called commas colons semicolons etc.

To hurry through the rise and fall of a fine, full sentence is like defying the role of time in human life.

One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language.

But with writing, all you need is a pad of paper.

I like commas. I detest semi-colons - I don't think they belong in a story. And I gave up quotation marks long ago. I found I didn't need them, they were fly-specks on the page.

I write longer sentences than most of the others, maybe because I probably like Henry James more than they do.

I admire writers such as Elmore Leonard who can nail a character in three or four lines of dialogue, so he doesn't need pages of back story or clumsy exposition.

I'm starting to think my narrators' sentences are getting too big for them, and they are getting to sound a bit samey and, more disturbingly, a bit too much like me.

I'm a 'frotteur,' someone who likes to rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that really is the best word possible. Does that word in this sentence have any electric potential? Does it do anything? Too much electricity will make your reader's hair frizzy. There's a question of pacing.

I first started writing fiction in college because I was attracted to beautiful sentences. I loved to read them. I wanted to write them.

Every sentence stands on its own. Whether that's fair or not, that's kind of the way it is.

I'm a language-oriented writer who proceeds sentence by sentence.

When you're writing stuff that's already clotted with neologisms and trying to get across fairly abstruse concepts, you're already putting a heavy burden on the reader.

That's always the most productive research - research into tone, into voice. Facts are nice, too, but facts are more raw material than creative inspiration.

I think my writing changed when I put 'the' in front of my titles. It had more command.

I enjoy finding the right word and giving each its full measure, its full space in a sentence.