Hugh Howey Quotes

When we watch stories, we learn empathy, we learn compassion, and hopefully we achieve some sort of understanding.

I was thinking one of the great things about fiction is we, as a race, only get to look out of our own eyes at the world. And fiction is a fantastic way of looking out through somebody else's eyes.

If you read literature, you put yourself in somebody else's shoes. You learn from great figures in literature.

We think empathy is innate, but it's not. It's a muscle you're working.

Stories teach us empathy. They reveal to us ourselves in the skins of others.

The unique thing that literature provides is to be able to step so fully into another situation and condition.

We all have a lot of people inside us, yet we get to live only one life. Fiction lets us slip into someone else’s skin, so to speak. That’s why we read novels, and also why we write them - to experience more life, through imagination.

Novels are . . . an unsurpassed form to understand people.

Fiction is the only way I know a human being can inhabit the mind of another human being.

Reading can almost be viewed as empathy training. Movies have better action scenes, sure. But books are uniquely suited to showing you the inside of another person's head. That is the root of empathy. That's the first step to understanding you're not alone in the world.

Empathy is the most mysterious transaction that the human soul can have, and it's accessible to all of us, but we have to give ourselves the opportunity to identify, to plunge ourselves in a story where we see the world from the bottom up or through another's eyes or heart.

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

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.

Change begins with understanding and understanding begins by identifying oneself with another person: in a word, empathy. The arts enable us to put ourselves in the minds, eyes, ears and hearts of other human beings.

I would like to think that as a result of not just my own experiences, but at least being empathetic and compassionate about other people's experiences and plights and tragedies, that I am affected by it and learn from it.

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

It's got to do with putting yourself in other people's shoes and seeing how far you can come to truly understand them. I like the empathy that comes from acting.

You have to see and smell and feel the circumstances of people to really understand them.

As authors, most - most authors, our art is portraying the human condition. Trying to show you what it's like to be somebody else, trying to make you feel for somebody else. That means you have to have a high degree of empathy.

If fiction changes things, it's usually because it's a powerful way of exploring social issues. And it helps us to understand people who are different from us.

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

Writing really evokes empathy in a way very few things can do.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

I felt that writing about peoples' lives was a heck of a responsibility, and I wanted to know them in a deep way.

I will never actually be able to know what it's like to go through life in someone else's body.