Julia Glass Quotes

To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another's life.

Stories have always been the things that entertain me and make me feel happy and sad and move me and give me the experience of being able to live many lives in one lifetime. It's the best thing about being alive.

One of the fantastic things about books, fiction or non-fiction, is the way they give you a chance to look into different lives.

The good thing about being an actor, and the gift of being an actor, is that you are beautifully forced to see the world with different eyes.

If fantasy is done well, it has both serious content in a literary fashion and is a really good read as well - and children and young adults won't suffer anything else.

When we read fiction, we want to get outside of ourselves and are able to see from a perspective we haven't seen through before. That can be very powerful.

Literature and film have a way of lifting you from your own existence and transporting you to some foreign place and putting you in the shoes with an experience different than your own.

The radio is good for taking somebody else's experience and making you understand what it would be like. Because when you don't see someone, but you hear them talking - and, uh, that is what radio is all about - it's like when someone is talking from the heart. Everything about it conspires to take you into somebody else's world.

You need to be able to climb into a narrative and zip it up under your chin. You need to be able to see through the eyes of the hero, smell what he's smelling, hear what he's hearing.

Fiction is a particular kind of rhetoric, a way of thinking that I think can be useful in your life. It asks you to image the world through someone else's eyes, and it allows you to try to empathize with situations that you haven't actually experienced.

Part of the beauty of fiction is that we come alive in a body that we don't own.

Stories have a special way of putting us inside the people, inside the boots of the soldiers. You're absorbed in a way a documentary or nonfiction can't do for you.

Novels are make-believe and play for adults.

In the ongoing celebration that is literature, we are asked to imagine ourselves as other selves, for better or worse.

When you play a character, you get to see the world through their eyes. Whether it's a fictional world or a real world, you do get to see somebody else's point of view, whether he's a good guy or a bad guy.

I've always been spontaneous and outgoing... I've tried lots of things so I've got some good life experiences, which is great 'cause it means I've got lots of material to work with as an actor.

It doubles your perception, to write from the point of view of someone you're not.

Fiction can either be a mirror reflecting you back to yourself or it can be a clean pane of glass looking on the outside.

Just like all great stories, our fears focus our attention on a question that is as important in life as it is in literature: What will happen next?

Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.

Novels attempt to render human experience; that's really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.

As a writer and as a reader, I really believe in the power of narrative to allow us ways to experience life beyond our own, ways to reflect on things that have happened to us and a chance to engage with the world in ways that transcend time and gender and all sorts of things.

A novel can enlarge the empathy and imagination of both its author and its reader, and my experience, that sense of enlargement is most intense when I'm transported beyond the narrow limits of my daily life.

I think that's what I love about writing, is the ability to try to, in a sense, take a vacation from yourself and try to enter the sensibility of another time, another character, another place.

Many really good films allow us to empathize with other lives.