Ken Liu Quotes

I'm mostly a novelist these days, but I have written short stories in Fantasy, Science Fiction and horror.

I've loved sci-fi and speculative fiction since I was a kid. It was inevitable I'd try my hand at it at some point.

Every now and then I'll do little things, a short story or something, that doesn't have any fantastical elements, but mostly I like the power of playing God and I like to imagine things.

It's the imagination that is involved in sci-fi, and fantasy is what draws me to it. Stories, everything.

Fiction is lies; we're writing about people who never existed and events that never happened when we write fiction, whether its science fiction or fantasy or western mystery stories or so-called literary stories. All those things are essentially untrue. But it has to have a truth at the core of it.

Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.

In a sense, fantasy is a freer play of the imagination. You can achieve exactly the situation you want with less groundwork, less of a need to fill in all of the background. For science fiction, I would use a lot of sources to set up, for instance, what a being from another planet would be like.

As an SF writer, you've got the infinite toolkit of the writer at your disposal.

As a writer of fiction, lying is the central thing to all books.

I have 20 or 30 books completely plotted out in my mind - mysteries, thrillers, horror, romance, science fiction. You name it.

Fantasy and science fiction are where my brain lives.

I can't do fiction unless I visualize what's going on. When I began to write science fiction, one of the things I found lacking in it was visual specificity. It seemed there was a lot of lazy imagining, a lot of shorthand.

The way I usually put it is that as an SF writer, I'm never required to be right.

Take it from me: I really love making things up, which is why I write fiction for a living.

I never thought I could write fiction.

Fiction is a report from the interior.

In any genre you're working in, you can always find a way to tell a particular kind of story. I love fantasy; I love science fiction. I love all kinds of fiction, in fact.

I don't look at stories in genres. A good story is a good story, no matter what planet it happens on, whether the characters are mice or human or whatever. That's how I look at it.

Most fiction comes from your experience.

When I was in my late twenties, a friend suggested that, since I was an avid SF reader and had been since I was barely a teenager, that since it didn't look like the poetry was going where I wanted, I might try writing a science fiction story. I did, and the first story I ever wrote was 'The Great American Economy.'

Being a fiction writer makes you someone who works with irresponsibility.

I write fiction. I make things up, it's what I do.

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over world-building.

I was inspired to become a writer by horror movies and science fiction.

My stories include realistic fiction and fantasy.