Ken Liu Quotes

I don't think the relationship between novels and realities are one to one. Of course novels play different roles. It's essentially just a long narrative form. What you use that long narrative form for can be very different.

I use a lot of film images, analogies, and imagination.

The difference between writing a story and simply relating past events is that a story, in order to be acceptable, must have shape and meaning. It is the old idea that art is the bringing of order out of chaos.

I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction.

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.

I often use hypothetical situations to generate information and imagery for paintings and to create a fictional space where a subject can be put into play.

One of the things I'm trying to do over and over again in my books is create new mythologies, create new ways to understand the complexity of the world. I think what mythology does is impress upon chaotic experience the patterns, hierarchies and shapes which allow us to interpret the chaos and make fresh sense of it.

As a child, I read a great many books in which animals and birds played significant roles, not only in the narrative itself, but also in creating the emotional and psychological atmosphere of that narrative - the imaginative furniture, as it were, in which any story unfolds.

In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature.

Fiction connects: past and present; the great and the small; the surface with the depths. Fiction brings out the innermost, invisible springs of life that cannot be revealed in factual narratives.

I think cinema is closer to allegories than to reality. It's closer to our dreams.

Literature incarnates its meanings as concretely as possible. The knowledge that literature gives of a subject is the kind of knowledge that is obtained by (vicariously) living through an experience.

I admire 'Adventure Time' for being a piece of art in the way that I think art should be. If you want to see it is poetry, you can, and if you don't, you can watch a fun cartoon.

I loved reading when I was young. I was just completely taken by stories. And I remember taking that into English literature at school and taking that into Shakespeare and finding that opened up a whole world of self-expression to me that I didn't have access to previously.

I don't want to deal with big, grand themes in my stories; art has nothing to do with themes. When you deal with themes, you are not creating; you are lecturing.

Wes Anderson's mind must be an exciting place for a story idea to be born. It immediately becomes more than a series of events and is transformed into a world with its own rules, in which everything is driven by emotions and desires as convincing as they are magical.

Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned artifice.

The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It's the thing that people create.

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

In thus pointing out certain respects in which philosophy resembles literature more than science, I do not mean, of course, to imply that it would be well for philosophy if it ceased to aim at scientific rigor.

You don't know reality until someone makes a fiction of it. Reality needs the completion of fiction.

There's so much power in allegory, to form ideas and learn lessons that you can actually take and apply to real life. I think that's why I originally really loved fantasy and reading.

Memory depends mainly upon myth. Some even occurs in our minds, in actuality or in fantasy; we form it in memory, molding it like clay day after day - and soon we have made out of that event a myth. We then keep the myth in memory as a guide to future similar situations.

That's what I like most about writing fiction over journalism: the easy metaphors!

I think the basic thing that happened is we have lost our story. Humans think in stories, and we try to make sense of the world by telling stories.