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.”

“Taking away men's weapons will be not bring peace. They'll fight with sticks and stones, and tooth and nail. Mapidéré's is a peace supported only by fear, as secure as a nest built on a rotten branch.”

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

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

“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' was meant to read like a set of legends about characters who were bigger than life.”

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

“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.”

“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've always thought it nonsense to believe something true simply because it was written in a book long ago.”

“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.”

“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'm not sure I necessarily have explicit messages.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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'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.”

“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.”