Ken Liu Quotes

The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.

I understand that when people read my books that there's something there - but I don't identify with it.

The writer will write in his or her words, but the readers, even when they are not reading you, will take it elsewhere entirely.

I feel that form determines how readers read a book and how they judge it.

I can't control what a reader takes from a story.

Once an author finishes a poem, he becomes merely another reader. I may remember what I intended to put into a text, but what matters is what a reader actually finds there which is usually something both more and less than the poet planned.

As I read, I start to form clear ideas of the characters and allow myself to be a proper conduit for this author's voice so that you will feel you have been on a seductive audio journey.

To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.

I love it when people want to interpret my books.

Your intention for a book is never the same as the reception.

Certainly one of the surprising truths of having a book published is realizing that your book is as open to interpretation as an abstract painting. People bring their own beliefs and attitudes to your work, which is thrilling and surprising at the same time.

Of course, you can't legislate for how people are going to read.

I'm an avid reader myself, and what any one reader accesses at any one time is very powerful and personal to them. Clearly you can't even begin to touch that. A novel is a singular vision, and then a myriad of readers have their own experience of that.

I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers.

Sometimes a book is better than it ever had a right to be because of the history the reader brings to the reading and because of the methods educators use to bring a particular story alive.

The gift of a writer as good as Dickens is not to explain everything; that way, the reader has, in terms of their imagination, somewhere to go.

But an experienced reader is also a self-aware and critical reader. I can't remember ever reading a story without judging it.

If I've vividly laid out the narrative, the reader will come to his own conclusions.

Personally I don't like it when writers become excessively proscriptive about the way that people read their books.

Naturally, the reader has access only to the events I show and the way I show them, but as has been said, there's generally a good deal of ambiguity in that presentation.

I think once you write fiction, you put it out, and it can be interpreted in a variety of ways, some of which are going to be shocking to the writer.

When I was growing up, a lot of books affected me, but I never wrote letters to the author or anything like that. I'm always mindful that there are probably a whole bunch of people reading my books like that, too.

For a lot of readers these days, a book is something you have to agree or disagree with. But you can't agree with a novel. For my generation, it was assumed that a book is a dramatic thing, that the eye of the book is not telling you what to think.

Whether or not a text really is a universe unto itself, it is safe to say that it can only ever be as rich as its most sensitive interpreter.

It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books . . .