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.

Ken Liu

• Writing
• Real
• Truth
• History
• Nature

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Quotes to Explore

• I couldn't tell the truth if my life depended on it.

  

  Rabih Alameddine
  • Life
  • Truth
  • My Life

• 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.

  

  Jack Nance
  • Real
  • Done
  • Me

• 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.

  

  Gabriel Byrne
  • Real
  • Experience
  • Prayer

• After 'The Poisonwood Bible' was published, several people believed that my parents were missionaries, which could not be further from the truth.

  

  Barbara Kingsolver
  • People
  • Truth
  • Parents

• Sometimes the kids come up with better endings than the real story.

  

  Gail Carson Levine
  • Up
  • Real
  • Kids

• 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.

  

  Fernando Botero
  • Life
  • Art
  • Nature

• Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.

  

  Rachel Cusk
  • Writing
  • Place
  • Criticism

• 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.

  

  Xavier Becerra
  • Work
  • History
  • Years

• I really like all of the characters in 'The Secret History' by Donna Tartt, especially Camilla, the one girl. I find her fascinating.

  

  Hannah Murray
  • History
  • Girl
  • Find

• One of the pleasantest things about book writing is that sometimes it brings one in touch with old friends.

  

  Rachel Field
  • Writing
  • Book
  • Friends

• 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.

  

  Nathaniel Branden
  • World
  • Country
  • History

• 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.

  

  D. B. Weiss
  • People
  • Real
  • Know

• 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.

  

  Paolo Bacigalupi
  • World
  • Writing
  • Girl

• Indeed, throughout much of history and in many cultures, redheads have been viewed with suspicion and fear - and even killed - because of their hair.

  

  Kate Williams
  • History
  • Fear
  • Hair

• Writing for the theater, you find yourself living a nocturnal life.

  

  Irwin Shaw
  • Life
  • Writing
  • Yourself

• We are not by nature cruel.

  

  J. M. Coetzee
  • Nature
  • Cruel

• I'm a country girl. I have to be in nature, so my daughter is exposed to it a lot.

  

  Salma Hayek
  • Country
  • Nature
  • Girl

• I worked with Ismail Merchant on 'The Mystic Masseur,' I did 'Sakina's Restaurant,' I've done plays, I've been on Broadway, I've done movies, I've done TV... but nothing has had the pop culture penetrative impact as 'The Daily Show' has. It's the nature of the beast.

  

  Aasif Mandvi
  • Done
  • Nature
  • Culture

• What did a happy ending even mean in real life, anyway? In stories you simply said, 'They lived happily ever after,' and that was it. But in real life people had to keep on living, day after day, year after year.

  

  Scott Westerfeld
  • People
  • Life
  • Real

• Stage and film are just two wildly different animals. Why compare the two?

  

  Bebe Neuwirth
  • Different
  • Why
  • Film

• On on-air debates: 'When I get into an argument on the air, the man can always yell louder, if a man fights like hell, he's being forceful; if I raise my voice and fight like hell, I'm being a shrew and a bitch.'

  

  Nancy Grace
  • Air

• You no longer have much in the way of knowing what to do in a big, epic novel about the future, because nobody knows what the hell is going to happen.

  

  Jerry Pournelle
  • Future

• All instincts that do not discharge themselves outwardly turn inward - this is what I call the internalization of man: thus it was that man first developed what was later called his 'soul.'

  

  Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Soul

• 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.

  

  Ken Liu
  • Writing
  • Real
  • Truth