China Mieville Quotes

In 2014, when my wife, Courtney, was expecting our daughter and we were contemplating a name, I said, 'How about Finley?' Only after Courtney said that she loved the name did I reveal that it was inspired by an aspect of Samuel Finley Brown Morse.

You won't believe it, but my grandfather named me. And the choices were between Sparkle, Sprinkle and Twinkle. So, thank God, they chose Twinkle.

The main thing is that the 'C' is silent, so it kind of starts with a 'Z.' Z-O-O-K-RIE. It's Ukrainian, on my dad's side.

My father had wanted to name me for Dylan Thomas. He had seen him speak on one of those drunken poetry tours he did.

My grandmother was a Jewish juggler: she used to worry about six things at once.

My grandfather was in World War II and fought in Europe in Army Infantry, so I have such a huge respect for him, and he's shared some personal experiences with me.

I love to compare different time frames. Poetry can evoke the time of the subject. By a very careful choice of words you can evoke an era, completely throw the poem into a different time scale.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

I was named after Yul Brynner because my mother had an infatuation with him. Who the hell names a Cuban kid Yul? Talk about a torturous childhood.

I love' Les Mis,' and I owe it a lot, because I wouldn't have been born without it.

That's how I got my name, you know. The Bonny scot, see?

I mean I have a project that I have been wanting to make for quite a while now; and basically, it's a story of my parents growing up in the Lower East Side.

Verse comedy is interesting to me because of the challenge of writing in rhymed couplets, which is not a form that's usually amenable to English, yet to me it gives great possibility for comedy.

If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.

Take a simple name like Nicholas: you can rhyme it with ridiculous. If you aren't too meticulous. You know, every word's rhymable.

In a poem the excitement has to maintain itself. I am governed by the pull of the sentence as the pull of a fabric is governed by gravity.

My mother, twenty-two, was Harriet Gautier Brooks, named for her paternal grandmother, but always called Hallie. My father, twenty-six, was Albert Horton Foote, named for his father and great-grandfather, and I was named Albert Horton Foote, Jr.

Breast cancer, whether I like it or not, is part of my family's story. That's why I am so passionate about raising awareness, because I have seen firsthand how it can impact others.

What I love about the stories of the Great Migration is that this is not ancient history; this is living history. Most people of color can find someone in their own family who had experienced a migration of some kind, knowing the sense of dislocation, longing and fortitude.

Fereydun, that's my dad's name. My grandmother, my dad's mom, when she was pregnant, she was dating a man from Persia, a Persian gentleman. It wasn't his child, but he was still very supportive and said, 'Hey, this is a great name,' and so it stuck. So that's what she named him.

I have felt great advances in my poetry, the main one being a growing victory over word nuances and a superfluity of adjectives.

With poets, the choice of words is invariably more telling than the story line; that's why the best of them dread the thought of their biographies being written.

My mom says it's an American version of the French name Jolie. My dad says I'm named after Al Jolson.

My first name, with the rare two-r spelling, came from a sportswriter named Garry Schumacher. My parents didn't know him personally, but my mother liked the spelling.

The name Jack was given by an American tourist.