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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.


China Mieville

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JEFF BURDEEN Not only is there no building like it in Iowa, but there is no building like it in the world.
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MARK RYLANCE Are you taking us to the beach?" - Dan Cahill
JUDE WATSON Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over world-building.
M. JOHN HARRISON When I took my (recruiting) trip it was not very nice, it was just very basic and pretty generic. Th...
JASON DONALD World-building numbs the reader's ability to fulfill their part of the bargain because it believ...
M. JOHN HARRISON She buys "mixed salad greens" for seven dollars a bag, triple-washed with who knows what. And to get...
RUDOLPH DELSON I felt like I was building this world brick by brick with each layer of instrumentation I was doing....
WASHED OUT A lot of my personality was informed by feeling very different in the world I grew up in, feeling th...
JHUMPA LAHIRI I loved 'Dungeons & Dragons'. That was actually a good cartoon to me.
JIM RASH Director Gary Ross has created an adaptation that is faithful in both narrative and theme, but he...
SUZANNE COLLINS There's no question that how Johannesburg operates is what made me interested in the idea of wea...
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ALEXANDER CHEE Nobody in the world knew about Megan Fox until I found her and put her in 'Transformers.' I ...
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JAMES GREENWOOD A C.E.O.'s job is leadership, problem solving, and team building. I've done that my whole ca...
BRUCE RAUNER I think, with production, I pay very close attention. 'Cause that's my favorite thing in mus...
TRAVIS SCOTT I also grew up building theatrical scenery. I spent many years building scenery as a large part of m...
NICK OFFERMAN I grew up in suburbia, so it's a world I'm familiar with... but in my experience, all the fa...
JEFF BAENA To the extent that China succeeds in building its capital markets, it will increase the size of the ...
CHRISTOPHER COX It looks ancient," - Amy Cahill
JUDE WATSON The first thing that an architect must do is to sense that every building you build is a world of it...
LOUIS KAHN People say my world is dark. No, there's a lot of lightness in my world. But I know very well th...
BENJAMIN CLEMENTINE The heart is a small thing, but desireth great matters. It is not sufficient for a kite's dinner...
FRANCIS QUARLES We do have wireless in the library. But no where else, not even close to the whole building.
SCOTT CASE One of my sisters is physically and mentally handicapped. She took a lot of my parents' attentio...
ALEX KINGSTON I grew up in the East Village with a lot of old people in my building, and I'm not sure if they ...
SARAH HYLAND Never, never pin your whole faith on any human being: not if he is the best and wisest in the whole...
C.S. LEWIS People say the most important thing is building a world-class team.
BEN HOROWITZ When you think of what Americans accomplished, building these amazing cities and all the good it'...
FRANK MILLER We still have that same burn, to get that same kind of laughs. So whether the studio wants us to or ...
SHAWN WAYANS Music is my favorite thing in the world. I grew up completely around it and I think it's one of ...
RILEY KEOUGH I've always been a gamer. I play a version of Dungeons & Dragons.
THOMAS MIDDLEDITCH I've been strongly opposed to racial discrimination and anything like that my whole life. Maybe ...
TED OLSON I grew up in a household that revered building businesses. It wasn't thinking about leadership; ...
PENNY PRITZKER I grew up in Brooklyn, New York. I grew up in a very Jewish neighbourhood and thought the whole worl...
LARRY CHARLES I think that there is a concern, a question mark, by people all around the world and governments all...
GARY LOCKE I was a founding member of the 'Dungeons and Dragons' club at my high school. I was in choru...
JOHN C. REILLY I grew up in South Africa and I would look at maps and we were at the bottom of the world. There was...
CHARLIZE THERON The tallest building in the world is now in Dubai, the biggest factory in the world is in China, the...
FAREED ZAKARIA When I read 'Fantastic Beasts,' the world that J. K. Rowling has created is so wonderful.
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SAM TAYLOR-JOHNSON I don't remember a single thing in my childhood that was not related in some way to building.
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ROBERT PICARDO I think the hardest thing about my life is that I've met so many people all over the world who I...
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LUANNE RICE World-building is my favorite pastime, so with me, I'm always about reining myself in. I don'...
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KEVIN MCCLOUD It SMELLS ancient," - Dan Cahill
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MICHAEL IGNATIEFF My parents leaving a third world country to a first world country and building from nothing - that&#...
MELANIE FIONA Magic: The Gathering is like Dungeons and Dragons if D&D was played with cards and didn't ta...
MARYJANICE DAVIDSON I grew up in the world of bad television, on my dad's sets and then as a young schmuck on dating...
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HELEN CLARK My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the 'New York Times' Building.
ANN COULTER The end of the world is a strange concept. The world is always ending, and the end is always being a...
NEIL GAIMAN There's a glee in building a world that is constructed on corporate synergy and all the luxuries...
COLIN TREVORROW I've never actually participated in role-playing games myself, except on one occasion when a cow...
JEFFREY THOMAS One place that I really feel comfortable is being a comedienne. I'm very socially inept. There&#...
MARGARET CHO I grew up doing a lot of traveling. My mom left home when she was 15 and traveled to 48 different co...
Q'ORIANKA KILCHER I don't think so, in that Virgin is already a global brand. Brands like Amazon have had to spend...
RICHARD BRANSON I remember finding a Houdini book at the library and seeing an image of him chained on the side of a...
DAVID BLAINE I'm building a career as big as humanly possible so I can be in a 'Star Wars' project. M...
RAHUL KOHLI It's not about today or tomorrow; it's about building a company that can build the best race...
ROBBY GORDON Today's China is not in the least shut out from the rest of the world. Trends come to us from al...
ZHANG ZIYI As I grew up in that world and saw how much it affected her world and how much it affected our child...
NATASHA RICHARDSON The thing I want to see before I die is women achieving full equality in the world. I'm very pas...
CHERIE BLAIR I'm very close with my family, so my mom is part of my entourage.
KID CUDI I do take this insane pleasure in world-building. I get the world in my head, but I have to make sur...
SAMANTHA SHANNON It's not the end of the world, but you can see it from there.
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THOMAS J. WATSON The best thought any writer ever come up with is of having a world with Dragons.
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SIMON MAINWARING My heart is on the brink of a world so foreign that it feels like a fantasy. Blessed do I feel when ...
IMANIA MARGRIA I always grew up with, 'Question authority.'
DANA CARVEY I think the kind of landscape that you grew up in, it lives with you. I don't think it's tru...
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LAWRENCE G. LOVASIK

More China Mieville

I don't like allegory.
CHINA MIEVILLE I always felt sorry for the sidekick as a kid. They never got their due and it left a very bad taste...
CHINA MIEVILLE A lot of geeks are pale, bespectacled, wear dark clothing and don't get out much - the stereotyp...
CHINA MIEVILLE Ever since I was two, I've loved octopuses, monsters, abandoned buildings.
CHINA MIEVILLE I'd never been to a science-fiction convention until I became a professional writer.
CHINA MIEVILLE I think the role of science fiction is not at all to prophesy. I think it is to tell interesting, vi...
CHINA MIEVILLE My parents went through the dictionary looking for a beautiful name, nearly called me Banyan, flicke...
CHINA MIEVILLE I do, however, feel reasonably strongly the sense that the job of a piece of argumentative scholarly...
CHINA MIEVILLE Geeks run the world. Condoleezza Rice is a geek, Bill Gates is clearly a geek, many of the big filmm...
CHINA MIEVILLE If I program ’ware with an Anglo-Ubiq word and play it, you understand it,” Scile said. “If I ...
CHINA MIéVILLE Any moment called now is always full of possibles.
CHINA MIéVILLE Word spread because word will spread. Stories and secrets fight, stories win, shed new secrets, whic...
CHINA MIéVILLE Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they're amiable and...
CHINA MIéVILLE A trap is only a trap if you don't know about it. If you know about it, it's a challenge.
CHINA MIéVILLE When people dis fantasy—mainstream readers and SF readers alike—they are almost always talking a...
CHINA MIéVILLE The only times I'm consistent about praying are when I'm on an airplane or when an ambulance...
CHINA CHOW Hatred is exhausting. You must constantly remind yourself why you hate someone and waste needless en...
SAVANIA CHINA Live a life that fits your specific circumstances, not one that fits someone else’s expectations
SAVANIA CHINA Don't waste time defending your intentions. History will judge you by the outcomes of your actions
SAVANIA CHINA The difference between your friend and your best friend is that your friend asks, ‘Are you are ok?...
SAVANIA CHINA The dead are way more organized than the living.
CHINA MIéVILLE Scars are not injuries, Tanner Sack. A scar is a healing. After injury, a scar is what makes you who...
CHINA MIéVILLE Loads of children read books about dinosaurs, underwater monsters, dragons, witches, aliens, and rob...
CHINA MIéVILLE We would never call inexplicable little insights 'hunches,' for fear of drawing the universe's atten...
CHINA MIéVILLE The investment is aiming at the air cargo market expansion in China.
CHINA AIRLINES Heaven might not be what everyone thinks it is, but that don’t mean it’s a myth.
CHINA MIéVILLE I hoped the hunter would come. I imagined him pushing through the thickets in the foothills. I've th...
CHINA MIéVILLE Scent of old books a mystery; a secret port of the dreamers.
CHINA CANCIO While yes we can both agree the sudden recovery of this footage smells not a little, and that we app...
CHINA MIéVILLE It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It's only being....
CHINA MIéVILLE Once I said to my father, 'Why do you want me?'

I still think that's the bravest thing I'...
CHINA MIéVILLE The road to success begins with knowing what you need to know and why
SAVANIA CHINA Always assume your assumptions about others are wrong. Because often, they are
SAVANIA CHINA I have always done things that made me happy. I work with people I like, and I do the job I like. I ...
CHINA MACHADO Dismissing fantasy writing because some of it is bad is exactly like saying I'm not reading Jane Eyr...
CHINA MIéVILLE The light was going: some cloud cover arriving, as if summoned by drama.
CHINA MIéVILLE A haggard man used one of the huts as a home. He lay on a sagging mattress, his head on his pack, su...
CHINA MIéVILLE My Google-fu is strong.
CHINA MIéVILLE Someone came in all Starfleet badges today. Not on my shift, sadly.'

'Fascist,' Leon had...
CHINA MIéVILLE Devils and Nazis don’t work well together.
CHINA MIéVILLE We speak now or I do, and others do. You've never spoken before. You will. You'll be able to say how...
CHINA MIéVILLE Success is not a finite resource; share it, wish it on others, and celebrate others
SAVANIA CHINA There's something intrinsically radical about the fantastic aesthetic - starting from the premise th...
CHINA MIéVILLE How could one not think of the stories we all grew up on, that surely the Ul Qomans grew up on too? ...
CHINA MIéVILLE Same weather over here as back home," I said.
CHINA MIéVILLE And even if you’re right, the CIA paid millions of dollars to men trying to kill goats by staring ...
CHINA MIéVILLE Tutte le note erano come a strati, un palinsesto di interpretazione in progresso. Feci archeologia.
CHINA MIéVILLE «Si riferisce ai loro poteri magici? Vorrei, lo vorrei tanto. Ma anche così questi scavi sono inco...
CHINA MIéVILLE They looked like people-shaped clay in the moments before God breathed out.
CHINA MIéVILLE The early years of a Bes (and presumably an Ul Qoman) child are intense learnings of cues. We pick u...
CHINA MIéVILLE ...If she were studying Orciny, and there might be excellent reasons to do so, she'd be doing her do...
CHINA MIéVILLE Volunteering’s an early and strong indication that you’re not suited,” he said.
CHINA MIéVILLE But here’s the problem you’re not addressing. While yes we can both agree the sudden recovery of...
CHINA MIéVILLE If the techs are on it we're fine, but Briamiv and his buddy could fuck up a full stop at the end of...
CHINA MIéVILLE …where the two cities are close up they make for interference patterns, harder to read or predict....
CHINA MIéVILLE At the social/political/ juridical, etc., level, the organizing principle was less to do with games ...
CHINA MIéVILLE Like any dissidents they were neurotic archivists. Agree, disagree, show no interest in or obsess ov...
CHINA MIéVILLE His fidelity to the cliche transcended the necessity to communicate.
CHINA MIéVILLE Interstiality is a theme that is simultaneously genuinely interesting and potentially quite useful, ...
CHINA MIéVILLE There is no case,” he told her. “There’s a series of random and implausible crises that make n...
CHINA MIéVILLE You cannot train yourself to successfully and sustainedly unsee and unhear — you do them all...
CHINA MIéVILLE From that historically brief quite opaque moment, came the chaos of our material history, an anarchy...
CHINA MIéVILLE He walked with equipoise, possibly in either city. Schrödinger’s pedestrian.
CHINA MIéVILLE Is it more childish and foolish to insist that there is a conspiracy or that there is not?
CHINA MIéVILLE Tell me," Bren said. "I thought you'd despaired."
"I did, too."
"What then? Tell me...
CHINA MIéVILLE Oratees are addicts. Strung out on an Ambassador’s Language.
CHINA MIéVILLE Oh, bullshit,” Wyatt said. I blinked. “This isn’t one of those stories, Avice. One moment of c...
CHINA MIéVILLE You’d have known that without being told if you let yourself think about it.
CHINA MIéVILLE The return to anywhere you last visited as a child is difficult, especially when it’s a door. Your...
CHINA MIéVILLE You'd love a bit of pomp: that way in later years you might invoke end-of-empire ghosts.
CHINA MIéVILLE They hammered it with sometimes-guns, that violently assert the manchmal, this stuff, our everyday, ...
CHINA MIéVILLE The sounds aren’t where the meaning lives. […]

Their language is organised noise, lik...
CHINA MIéVILLE Language is the continuation of coercion by other means."
"Bullshit. It's cooperation." Both th...
CHINA MIéVILLE A classic unspoken agreement among escapees from a small town: don't look back, don't be each other'...
CHINA MIéVILLE As an immerser I progressed to the ranks I aspired to—those that granted me a certain cachet and i...
CHINA MIéVILLE Its surface sheened with saft that evaporated out from its crystal shielding in threads that degrade...
CHINA MIéVILLE There are no telepaths in this universe, I think, but there are empathics, with languages so silent ...
CHINA MIéVILLE Oh, bullshit. This isn't one of those stories, Avice. One moment of cack-handedness, Captain Cook of...
CHINA MIéVILLE A promise fulfilled may be a classic moment, but prophecies mean anticlimax. How much more awesome w...
CHINA MIéVILLE Now the Ariekei were learning to speak, and to think, and it hurt.
CHINA MIéVILLE BEFORE THE HUMANS came we didn’t speak so much of certain things. Before the humans came we didn�...
CHINA MIéVILLE We have to establish our credentials as an explorocracy; so to survive and rule ourselves, we have t...
CHINA MIéVILLE I needed to be alone for whatever would happen. I knew that something would as certainly as if this ...
CHINA MIéVILLE Sometimes translation stops you understanding.
CHINA MIéVILLE Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth...
CHINA MIéVILLE I couldn't tell if I was perspicacious or paranoid.
CHINA MIéVILLE I'd never understood the injunction not to regret anything, couldn't see how that wasn't cowardice.....
CHINA MIéVILLE I differ with myself then agree, like the rock that was broken and cemented together. I change my op...
CHINA MIéVILLE I don't want to be a simile anymore,' I said. "I want to be a metaphor.
CHINA MIéVILLE A scholar can never let mere wrongness get in the way of the theory.
CHINA MIéVILLE For every action, there's an infinity of outcomes. Countless trillions are possible, many milliards ...
CHINA MIéVILLE Открой-ка рот. И как у тебя язык повернулся разболтать �...
CHINA MIéVILLE It ain't that he's not interested in, like, persuasiveness, get me? He's interested in it. Like some...
CHINA MIéVILLE Your job is to get villains. Right? You'll have to know what to do. If you don't know, you have to f...
CHINA MIéVILLE Everything's fit to be worshipped.
CHINA MIéVILLE And the continual non-up-turnance of so valuable a commodity as a giant squid—the thought of getti...
CHINA MIéVILLE Some midnight-of-all or other [apocalypse] was predicted every few days or nights. Most came to noth...
CHINA MIéVILLE A few mad exaggerations, alright, within a couple of days: swear to fucking god, they were like thro...
CHINA MIéVILLE How do you...? What is it you're doing?" he said to Vardy as the man took a breath, mid-insight. Wha...
CHINA MIéVILLE When he had first started at the center, he had liked to think that he was unexpectedly cool-looking...
CHINA MIéVILLE Just her, three men, a fidgety pig and lawful intent.
CHINA MIéVILLE Death isn't what it used to be
CHINA MIéVILLE But this was not quite the right kraken apocalypse.
CHINA MIéVILLE Dark came early and stayed full of lights and the shouts of children.
CHINA MIéVILLE Fortune-telling was quantum betting, a competitive scrying of variably likely outcomes.
CHINA MIéVILLE You got to be worried when they're agreeing about anything," she said. "Prophets. That's the last bl...
CHINA MIéVILLE Dane discarded his speargun with visible relief. As a paladin of the Church of God Kraken, he had fe...
CHINA MIéVILLE As he got older, Billy suspected, he would, Dicaprio-like, simply become like an increasingly wizene...
CHINA MIéVILLE Virgina Woolf versus Edward Lear."

"Christ Alive," said Billy. "Are those my only choices...
CHINA MIéVILLE I know, I know," Moore said. "Mad beliefs like that, eh? Must be some metaphor, right? Must mean som...
CHINA MIéVILLE Just thugs only ever got so far. The best thugs were all psychologists.
CHINA MIéVILLE Art Nouveau was coil-envy.
CHINA MIéVILLE He knows religion is bollocks," Collingswood said. "He just wishes he didn't.
CHINA MIéVILLE The sea is full of saints. You know that? You know that: you're a big boy.

The sea's ful...
CHINA MIéVILLE We cannot see the universe. We are in the darkness of a trench, a deep cut, dark water heavier than ...
CHINA MIéVILLE Subby Subby Subby," whispered Goss. "Keep those little bells on your slippers as quiet as you can. S...
CHINA MIéVILLE We should have just killed him, that's a lesson, don't get creative with revenge
CHINA MIéVILLE Be smart. You Only Die Once -YODO
SAVANIA CHINA Break the rules not because you don’t know better, but because you know them too well
SAVANIA CHINA Although sometimes the road to success follows a path less-travelled, a path less-travelled often le...
SAVANIA CHINA The manager of my line told me, You never put anything down except to be read. Every word ever writt...
CHINA MIéVILLE A mile below the lowest cloud, rock breaches water and the sea begins.
It has been given many n...
CHINA MIéVILLE My dad hates umbrellas, said Deeba, swinging her own. When it rains he always says the same thing. '...
CHINA MIéVILLE When people dis fantasy—mainstream readers and SF readers alike—they are almost always talking a...
CHINA MIéVILLE This is a Possible Letter. Until the last second, when I write your name beside that word “Dear,�...
CHINA MIéVILLE Scars are memory. Like sutures. They stitch the past to me.
CHINA MIéVILLE If the fucking Scar exists,” whispered the Brucolac, still without turning, “and if they get us ...
CHINA MIéVILLE My sisters and I like a lot of different styles of music, but we're inspired by real artists lik...
CHINA ANNE MCCLAIN When I perform, I like to wear funky flats, leather boots or knee-high Converse with bright laces. T...
CHINA ANNE MCCLAIN It's all in the reflexes.
"JACK BURTON" (KURT RUSSELL), MOVIE BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA