Ken Liu quotes

We are defined by the places we hold in the web of others' lives. (Ken Liu)
Translation is an act of recreation.
Ken Liu
The idea that somehow the way forward is to abandon the past, to me, is preposterous and both undesirable and unrealistic.
Ken Liu
The truth is not delicate and it does not suffer from denial-the truth only dies when true stories are untold.
Ken Liu
I don't really care that much about genre labels. I tend to write across a variety of different genres.
Ken Liu
The evolution of technology is, like the evolution of literature, heavily path-dependent. Culture plays a far more important role in the acceptance, adoption, and spread of technology than many of us are willing to acknowledge.
Ken Liu
I find most 'rules' about how to write a 'good story' confining, and I enjoy writing stories that don't look like stories at all on the surface.
Ken Liu
There are so many different narrative traditions across the world, and each of those traditions has evolved dramatically over time. Once I understood that, I felt truly free; I could write and invent the way I wanted to because there never has been only one way to tell a good story.
Ken Liu
Short fiction encourages experimentation, and it's fun to play with form and try experiments that may or may not work out.
Ken Liu
Like pretty much every short story writer, I submitted to every market under the sun and hoped for the best. The rejection letters I've collected over the years can probably make a book of their own.
Ken Liu
My metaphor for translation has always been that translation is really a performance art. You take the original and try to perform it, really, in a different medium. Part of that is about interpretation and what you think the author's voice really is. (Ken Liu)
My translation work has been pretty separate from my fiction, as it was basically an accidental side project that turned into a separate and parallel career.
Ken Liu
The way a story makes an argument is quite different from the way a persuasive essay does it. Emotional truth and the logic of metaphors dominate.
Ken Liu
I get to use fiction as a way to work out my thinking and to delight readers in the process. I can't think of any deal that's better for me, and I'm always so grateful that readers have indulged me as I argue with myself in my stories.
Ken Liu
In every revolution, there are winners and losers. Every dystopia is a utopia for somebody else. It just depends where you are. Are you in the class that benefits, or are you in the class that's not?
Ken Liu
Researching real history has taught me to be bolder and more imaginative in building fantasy worlds and writing fantasy characters, to seek out the margins of history and the forgotten tales that illuminate the whole, complex truth of our flawed yet wondrous nature as a species.
Ken Liu
I wanted to make my stories, which are inspired by Asian stories, into something fresh, decontextualized - to give them new life as a new kind of fantasy that isn't so cloying and exotic and strange.
Ken Liu
I like the law. I like the part that's about reasoning, about persuasion, about telling stories, about trying to build structures that fall within rules.
Ken Liu
Because my writing time has always been very limited, I try to be very choosy about which stories I work on. There are many ideas that would make interesting stories - too many - so it's important to be ruthless and say no to most of them.
Ken Liu
Trying to predict the future is a loser's game.
Ken Liu
There is no way for me to replicate for you what a sentence reads like for a Chinese reader. (Ken Liu)
We have never had a society that was truly just. Some groups have always benefited at the expense of others.
Ken Liu
I still think in a parallel universe, I became a mathematician.
Ken Liu
I am not an expert on Chinese science fiction. I probably know more than anyone else in the West, but that doesn't actually mean I am an expert.
Ken Liu
Trying to project our expectations and our desires onto the sci-fi being written in China now isn't terribly helpful.
Ken Liu