Ken Liu Quotes
Researching real history has taught me to be bolder and more imaginative in building fantasy worlds and writing fantasy characters, to seek out the margins of history and the forgotten tales that illuminate the whole, complex truth of our flawed yet wondrous nature as a species.
Quotes to Explore
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I couldn't tell the truth if my life depended on it.
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But Eraserhead was the first real intense kind of thing I had ever done before the cameras and Lynch had to really bring me down a lot and he still does.
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Being listened to and being heard is an experience that doesn't happen terribly often. To listen compassionately or nonjudgmentally to another person - not to get too heavy about it - but I once heard somebody say that was a form of real prayer.
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After 'The Poisonwood Bible' was published, several people believed that my parents were missionaries, which could not be further from the truth.
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Sometimes the kids come up with better endings than the real story.
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Art is always an exaggeration in some sense; in color, in form, even in theme, etc... but it has always been this way. It is the same with the nature of some works by Giotto or Massacio, or the color of life as expressed by Van Gogh.
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Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.
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But 18 years after the passage of the Civil Liberties Act, there still remains unfinished work to completely rectify and close this regrettable chapter in our Nation's history.
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I really like all of the characters in 'The Secret History' by Donna Tartt, especially Camilla, the one girl. I find her fascinating.
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One of the pleasantest things about book writing is that sometimes it brings one in touch with old friends.
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The United States was the first country in the history of the world to be consciously created out of an idea - and the idea was liberty.
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We know that the elements in play in a show like 'Confederate' are much more raw, much more real, and people come into them much more sensitive and more invested, than they do with a story about a place called 'Westeros,' which none of them had ever heard of before they read the books or watched the show.
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When I was writing 'The Windup Girl' and 'Ship Breaker,' I was writing those simultaneously, so I was an unpublished writer, not really having that full sense that these books would go out in the world, that they would be successful, that there would be an audience and that there would be fans of those stories.
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Indeed, throughout much of history and in many cultures, redheads have been viewed with suspicion and fear - and even killed - because of their hair.
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Writing for the theater, you find yourself living a nocturnal life.
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Movie making is not like other art forms, like painting, or writing a novel, because that can be digested or interpreted... It takes two years to make each one of these, and it's always judged on money.
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From 1999 on - until 2003 - I covered publishing in a weekly column for Wired.com and wrote for several other publications - altogether writing over 150 articles.
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We are not by nature cruel.
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The ideas that have lighted my way have been kindness, beauty and truth.
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Poor Georgia O'Keeffe. Death didn't soften the opinions of the art world toward her paintings.
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I never used to bother with exercises. Now I spend at least 10 minutes each morning working out with small weights.
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Tradition is an element that enters into play with destiny, because you are born into a particular family - Jewish or Islamic or Christian or Mexican - and your family determines to some extent what you are expected to become. And society is always there attempting to determine the role we will play within it.
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It's the story of an American who wants to become a dictator and goes to Europe with a sidekick to interview various Fascists to find out how the Nazis and Mussolini got into power.
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Researching real history has taught me to be bolder and more imaginative in building fantasy worlds and writing fantasy characters, to seek out the margins of history and the forgotten tales that illuminate the whole, complex truth of our flawed yet wondrous nature as a species.
