Elizabeth Berg Quotes

I like reading novels because it provides insight into human behavior.

Acting requires a great amount of empathy for real lived human experiences.

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

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

The story is a machine for empathy. In contrast to logic or reason, a story is about emotion that gets staged over a sequence of dramatic moments, so you empathize with the characters without really thinking about it too much. It is a really powerful tool for imagining yourself in other people's situations.

I think acting can bring you closer to yourself and help you understand other people.

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

My approach as an actor has always been the same, in that the greatest gift that you're ever going to have is your imagination because you're not going to have all life experiences. So you draw on things that are sort of close to it but you spend your time expanding on it or drawing something specific on whatever your situation is.

It's great fun if you get a good piece of writing and you can pretend to be someone else, tell a story that needs to be told, make some kind of connection. I've always fancied myself as a leading man, but I really doubt whether anyone else sees me that way.

I love creating characters and becoming someone else entirely.

To be a writer is to connect and to play and to attempt to see clearly and understand. It astounds me regularly that feeling things deeply and writing them down is basically my job description.

I have always worked from that place, that if you are going to inhabit someone and get under their eyes, you need to have empathy.

I write because I have always been curious about what it would feel like to be someone else, in a different situation. Fiction is a wonderful way of exploring that.

The one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else's shoes. The reader's shoes. You've got to entertain them.

You use your emotions to try and find them in the character that you're playing.

It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel.

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.

The strength of fiction is not in reading about yourself, but in reading about other people.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

There's the argument that you can relate to someone who's completely unrelatable. In the way that a director shows you his imagination on a film, then I get to show you my imagination in a big dumb character.

I think I'm an actor because I have very strong imagination and empathy. I never studied acting, but those two qualities are exactly the qualities that make for an activist.

People are always the start for me... animals, when I can get into their heads, gods, supernatural beings, immortals, the dead... these are all people to me.

Because I'm highly empathetic, it's easy for me to put myself in the character's shoes. It's, you know, finding the truth of the moment.

Writing is weaponized empathy. It's putting yourself in someone else's head. It's finding what's in them that relates to you.

With every character, the first thing I want to feel is empathy.