China Mieville Quotes

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.

One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters.

I mean it's the writing, not the being read, that excites me.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic....Authors arrive at text and subtext in thousands of ways, learning each time they begin anew how to recognize a valuable idea and how to reader the texture that accompanies, reveals or displays it to its best advantage.

The search for the word gets no easier but nobody else is going to write your novel for you.

Writing a novel is a lot like reading one.

The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written.

When I wrote my novel, 'The Ministry of Special Cases,' I couldn't even brush my teeth. I had to write in isolation from everything else. I thought a play would take away from my fiction, but the more projects I work on, the more time I have.

I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it).

It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought.

Hitch your unconscious mind to your writing arm.

I won't read novels while writing novels.

You can't write ... on the strength of influence. You can only write a good story or a good novel by yourself.

Writing means not just staring ugliness in the face, but finding a way to embrace it.

Ironically, writing a novel is not a way to sort out your confusion.

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something-anything-down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft-you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft-you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it's loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.

Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do.

I've always been a writer, actually. Not many people assume that, but I kinda keep quiet about anything that I do until I'm ready to show it. It keeps me humble and also makes me work towards a goal.

Fiction does not spring into the world fully grown, like Athena. It is the process of writing and rewriting that makes a fiction original, if not profound.

I write dozens and dozens of pages more than I need, and then edit them down to size. It's more like sculpture than construction.

I wrote my first two long novels and an anthology of short narratives, when I was a manager of my own jazz bar. There was not enough time to write and I didn't know how to write novels. Therefore, I made written collages of aphorisms and rags.

I finish the book so I can see how it's going to end. I write that first sentence, and if it's the right first sentence, it leads to the right second sentence and three years later you have a 500-page manuscript, but it really is like going on a trip, going on a journey. It's a voyage.