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. Ken Liu Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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. Ken Liu Read Quote
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. Ken Liu Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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. Ken Liu Read Quote
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 Read Quote
The idea that somehow the way forward is to abandon the past, to me, is preposterous and both undesirable and unrealistic. Ken Liu Read Quote
It is not possible to completely eliminate mediation between you as an observer and the history you are trying to understand. Ken Liu Read Quote
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. Ken Liu Read Quote