Ken Liu

“Love, or the lack of it, is not within my domains of expertise.”

— Ken Liu

“she likes the sound of languages other than English.”

— Ken Liu

Translation is an act of recreation.

— Ken Liu

We are defined by the places we hold in the web of others’ lives.

— Ken Liu

“Mono no aware, my son, is an empathy with the universe.”

— 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

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

— Ken Liu

“The body is intelligent, I think. It knows how to say what it means to be alive better than the mind ever…

— Ken Liu

“A memory is a re-creation, precious because it is both more and less than the original.”

— Ken Liu

'The Grace of Kings' was meant to read like a set of legends about characters who were bigger than life.

— Ken Liu

“Every moment, as we walk on this earth, we are watched and judged by the eyes of the universe.”

— Ken Liu

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

— Ken Liu

“Could the stories that parents tell children to lull them to sleep actually be true?”

— Ken Liu

Like pretty much every short story writer, I submitted to every market under the sun and hoped for the best. The rejection…

— Ken Liu

“The agony of the dead is with us, and we hear their screams and walk among their ghosts. We cannot avert our…

— Ken Liu

Like steampunk, silkpunk is a blend of science fiction and fantasy. But while steampunk takes its inspiration from the chrome-brass-glass technology aesthetic…

— Ken Liu

I think the narrative of people being caught between two cultures as immigrants is very harmful. It's exclusionary. It essentially tries to…

— Ken Liu

“You’re just propagandists of a different ilk—for making the world flat, turning everywhere into copies of suburban America, studded with malls.”

— 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…

— Ken Liu

“By custom, we wield the sword and wear the armor, but who among you does not know a mother, sister, daughter, friend,…

— Ken Liu

The way a story makes an argument is quite different from the way a persuasive essay does it. Emotional truth and the…

— Ken Liu

I'm conscious of the fact that I'm sort of a bridging figure. I have my Chinese literary heritage and cultural background, so…

— Ken Liu

What is fascinating to me is the way I view everything in terms of parallels and connections. When I read about Achilles…

— Ken Liu

Real history is far more complex and interesting than the simplistic summaries presented in Wikipedia articles. Knowing this allows you to question…

— Ken Liu

I was a tax attorney for something like seven years, so I was a tax geek. I was really into it. Tax…

— Ken Liu

“But being the mirrors for each other's souls has a cost: by the time they part from each other, the individuals in…

— Ken Liu

There's this long history of colonialism and the colonial gaze when applied to matters related to China. So a lot of conceptions…

— Ken Liu

“We also fight our war against hail and storm, against drought and deprivation, against the sharp blade of the weeding hoe and…

— Ken Liu

The Singaporean speculative tradition is different. Singapore doesn't conceive itself as the centre of the world or the one country that's going…

— Ken Liu

“Every act of communication is a miracle of translation. At this moment, in this place, the shifting action potentials in my neurons…

— Ken Liu

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

— Ken Liu

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

— Ken Liu

“It’s hard to hear the music behind the words when their meanings get in the way,” she told me once.”

— Ken Liu

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

— 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 evolution of art is not only driven by artists, but by a conversation between the artists and the audience.

— 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

“The silence of the victims of the past imposes a duty on the present to recover their voices, and we are most…

— Ken Liu

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

— Ken Liu

I wanted to make my stories, which are inspired by Asian stories, into something fresh, decontextualized - to give them new life…

— Ken Liu