Top 78 Quotes & Sayings by Ken Liu

We have never had a society that was truly just. Some groups have always benefited at the expense of others.

In general, writers who talk to their colleagues and neighbors constantly about their own writing seem to me pretty insufferable. I try not to be that guy.

I still think in a parallel universe, I became a mathematician.

My fiction occupies, actually, the very heart of American culture: this eternal question and struggle of what it means to be an American.

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.

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.

Writers are naturally obsessed with books, the tangible artifacts of their labor. Even beyond the text, I love the physicality of books, the possibilities presented by their substance and form.

Translation is an act of recreation.

It is not possible to completely eliminate mediation between you as an observer and the history you are trying to understand.

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.

The 'Grace of Kings' isn't a narrative about a return to some golden age, to a lost status quo ante. It portrays a dynamic world in transition, where the redistribution of power is messy, morally ambivalent, and only lurches toward more justice.

There's this long history of colonialism and the colonial gaze when applied to matters related to China. So a lot of conceptions about China in literary representations in the West are things you can't even fight against because they've been there so long that they've become part of the Western imagination of China.

What tends to happen when people talk about Chinese sci-fi in the West is that there's a lot of projection. We prefer to think of China as a dystopian world that is challenging American hegemony, so we would like to think that Chinese sci-fi is all either militaristic or dystopian. But that's just not the reality of it.

Whenever you talk about Chinese dragons, emperors, palaces, concubines - they conjure up a whole colonial argle-bargle that has nothing to do with historical reality.

The way that China has been described in Western narratives makes it hard to tell a story that will escape the stereotypes and allow people to perceive it fresh.

Most of us do not, in fact, read another language, and so when we read a translation, we have no way of knowing what has been changed or added.

Trying to project our expectations and our desires onto the sci-fi being written in China now isn't terribly helpful.

Real history is far more complex and interesting than the simplistic summaries presented in Wikipedia articles. Knowing this allows you to question received wisdom, to challenge 'facts' 'everybody' knows to be true, and to imagine worlds and characters worthy of our rich historical heritage and our complex selves.

I write speculative fiction, and in my view, speculative fiction is really just a very intense version of the work of literature in general.

I was not trying to write some sort of serious meditation on war and peace. 'The Grace of Kings' is meant to be a fun book. It's meant to be an epic fantasy.

The novel that an author writes is often not the novel that the reader reads, and most of the 'messages' in a novel are put there by the reader. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. That's how literature functions.

The 'silk' in silkpunk refers not to a source of power, but to an entirely different, expressive technology language.

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.

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.

I think male authors who want to try to tackle these issues of representation of women can generally do a better job if they try to question traditional notions of masculinity and the sort of toxic nature of traditional ways of presenting masculinity.

Trying to predict the future is a loser's game.

I've been writing long enough to know that fiction, as a rhetorical mode, works very differently from expository writing. If an author has a specific critique about contemporary society in mind, fiction tends not to be the best means to deliver that critique.

There's inherent cultural imbalance whenever you're translating from Chinese to English. Educated Chinese readers are expected not only to know about all the Chinese references - history, language, culture, all this stuff - but to be well-versed in Western references as well.

The 'Grace of Kings' begins as a very dark, complicated world filled with injustices - among them the oppressed position of women - but gradually transforms into something better through a series of revolutions. But since real social change takes a long time, even by the end of the book, only the seeds of deep change have been planted.

The problems faced by writers of color are analogous to the problems face by women writers.

There is no way for me to replicate for you what a sentence reads like for a Chinese reader.

I'm very interested in foundational narratives.

I think that what's unique about sci-fi - at least from the view of a lot of Chinese writers - is that sci-fi is least-rooted in the particular culture that they're writing from.

If I end up having a novel that sells really well and that allows me to pay for health insurance and mortgage without having to work at a day job, that would be great.

The Singaporean speculative tradition is different. Singapore doesn't conceive itself as the centre of the world or the one country that's going to save the world, so there's a different tone that comes out in the way speculative fiction is done. That's refreshing to read.

I certainly have been writing stories that are hard science fiction, that are very reminiscent of 'Golden Age tales' from the '40s and '50s. I've also written stories that are very high fantasy that are the direct opposite of that style.

Like steampunk, silkpunk is a blend of science fiction and fantasy. But while steampunk takes its inspiration from the chrome-brass-glass technology aesthetic of the Victorian era, silkpunk draws inspiration from East Asian antiquity.

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.

Because I really love tax, tax topics actually feature quite a lot in my fiction of various lengths. I once wrote a science fiction short story centered around the idea of an alien tax code, and the idea that you can understand a society by parsing its tax code.

What is fascinating to me is the way I view everything in terms of parallels and connections. When I read about Achilles and Odysseus in Homer's 'Iliad,' I can see parallels in Chinese historical romances, in the way the first emperor of the Han dynasty and his chief rival are portrayed.

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.

In creating the silkpunk aesthetic, I was influenced by the ideas of W. Brian Arthur, who articulates a vision of technology as a language.

I don't really care that much about genre labels. I tend to write across a variety of different genres.

I think writing novels has taught me more about the value of patience and being organized. I've learned to use timelines and wikis to track decisions and make sure everything still fits together. It's both easier and harder than writing short fiction.

For 'The Grace of Kings,' I read Han Dynasty historical records in Classical Chinese, which allowed me to get a sense of the complexity of the politics and the 'surprisingly modern' reactions of the historical figures to recurrent problems of state administration.

For me, all fiction is about prizing the logic of metaphors - which is the logic of narratives in general - over reality, which is irreducibly random and senseless.

I think the narrative of people being caught between two cultures as immigrants is very harmful. It's exclusionary. It essentially tries to argue that some Americans are more real than others.

The idea that somehow the way forward is to abandon the past, to me, is preposterous and both undesirable and unrealistic.

People who are ambitious - politicians who crave power - think that they're in control of it, but at some point, the movement that they started overtakes them, and they lose the ability to direct things anymore, and they become essentially riders on a wild stallion, and wherever the movement goes, wherever power takes them, they have to go along.

I'm conscious of the fact that I'm sort of a bridging figure. I have my Chinese literary heritage and cultural background, so I'm comfortable with these things, but at the same time, I have to navigate the Anglo-American tradition, which has a self-centred view of what Asia and what being Chinese means.

I'm not sure I necessarily have explicit messages.

When I act as a translator, I am really doing a performance for my fellow Anglophone readers in the West.

I'm often asked how I get ideas for my stories. The answer is there's no single way; every story is different.

It's okay if you get rejected 20, 30 or 200 times... You don't need everyone to like your story - you just need one person who really likes your story.

I don't have a specific message for 'The Grace of Kings' and the sequels in mind other than wanting to challenge some of the source material I was working from as well as some of the assumptions of epic fantasy.

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?

'The Grace of Kings' draws on Western traditions as much as it does on Chinese traditions, though the bones of the story are drawn from the Chu-Han Contention period before the Han Dynasty.

My wife, Lisa, and I both grew up on wuxia - Chinese historical romances. They're kind of analogous to Western epics. They're based on history, just like 'the Iliad' and 'the Odyssey' are based on history, but they're romanticized, and a lot of fantasy elements have been added.

It's kind of cool that I know of all this great science fiction being written in China, and most of it is not really well-known in the West.

I was a tax attorney for something like seven years, so I was a tax geek. I was really into it. Tax is one of those things that people think is incredibly boring, but like any science about systems, once you get into it it, becomes incredibly intricate and interesting.