Ken Liu

I'm very interested in foundational narratives.

— Ken Liu

“Dad and I went on walking, our shadows touching.”

— Ken Liu

“Sometimes the stories we tell ourselves obscure our truths.”

— Ken Liu

“She may be from the sky, yet she is not so strange after all.”

— Ken Liu

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

— Ken Liu

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

— Ken Liu

I'm not sure I necessarily have explicit messages.

— Ken Liu

“All life is an experiment.’” “A”

— Ken Liu

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

— Ken Liu

I don't believe in reducing a style and a voice down to a set of descriptions, so I've never done that.

— Ken Liu

Almost all of my stories can be understood to be elaborations on our drive to remake the world and our adjustments to…

— 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

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

— Ken Liu

“I can only wish that someday you’ll also be pestered by a student as persistent to learn what you do not wish…

— Ken Liu

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

— Ken Liu

“I would like a window seat,” I said, imagining the stars streaming by.”

— Ken Liu

I think that what's unique about sci-fi - at least from the view of a lot of Chinese writers - is that…

— Ken Liu

The 'Grace of Kings' isn't a narrative about a return to some golden age, to a lost status quo ante. It portrays…

— Ken Liu

As an American writer, the literary tradition that I draw on the most is the Anglo-American one, and when you are writing…

— Ken Liu

“For a moment, as I listened to her, I felt as if I could step through the distance between us and hear…

— Ken Liu

It's incredible to me that any two individual minds, trapped in their skulls and bodies and histories and unique experiences, are able…

— Ken Liu

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

— 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…

— Ken Liu

The way that China has been described in Western narratives makes it hard to tell a story that will escape the stereotypes…

— Ken Liu

“To see the light side and the dark side of the Force as sunlit foam and shadowed eddies in the same Tide;…

— Ken Liu

“He’s not so bad, he thought. He’s graceful in defeat. That’s a quality that belongs to a phoenix among men. • •…

— Ken Liu

Researching real history has taught me to be bolder and more imaginative in building fantasy worlds and writing fantasy characters, to seek…

— Ken Liu

The 'Grace of Kings' begins as a very dark, complicated world filled with injustices - among them the oppressed position of women…

— Ken Liu

People who are ambitious - politicians who crave power - think that they're in control of it, but at some point, the…

— Ken Liu

My wife, Lisa, and I both grew up on wuxia - Chinese historical romances. They're kind of analogous to Western epics. They're…

— Ken Liu

What tends to happen when people talk about Chinese sci-fi in the West is that there's a lot of projection. We prefer…

— Ken Liu

There are so many different narrative traditions across the world, and each of those traditions has evolved dramatically over time. Once I…

— Ken Liu

“My goal is to act as a faithful interpreter, preserving as much of the original's nuances of meaning as possible without embellishment…

— Ken Liu

“The Tull-Toks claim that everything in the universe can be read. Each star is a living text, where the massive convection currents…

— Ken Liu

“But it is the event horizon around a black hole where the Tull-Toks claim the greatest books are to be found. When…

— Ken Liu

“History is a narrative enterprise, and the telling of stories that are true, that affirm and explain our existence, is the fundamental…

— Ken Liu

“You think destroying Centillion will free you, whatever ‘free’ means. But let me ask you, can you tell me the requirements for…

— Ken Liu

“Look up at the stars, and we are bombarded by light generated on the day the last victim at Pingfang died, the…

— Ken Liu

“Ever since I became an American, people have told me that America is about leaving your past behind. I’ve never understood that.…

— Ken Liu

“One way to understand fiction is to treat every story as an attempt to make an argument (Helena Bell has written more…

— Ken Liu