Neil Gaiman Quotes

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

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.

How can you build something for someone else if you don't have enough familiarity with them to imagine the world through their eyes?

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

THE MAGIC AND THE DANGER OF FICTION IS THIS: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, and cry for people who do not, outside of the story, exist. There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.

You have to be able to imagine lives that are not yours.

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.

Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else's shoes for a while.

Imaginative empathy is one of the great gifts that humans have, and it means that we can live more than one life. We can picture what it would be like from another perspective.

One of the reasons I write is to be in other people's skin.

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.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

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.

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

It's hard to put yourself in someone else's head.

The beauty of literature is you allow readers to see things through other peoples eyes. All good books do this.

It is human nature to imagine, to put yourself in another's shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy.

Reading will put you into the minds and hearts of others. It might help you understand why other people do what they do sometimes.

We have to listen to other people's stories. That's the thing. And that's the only way that we eventually get to know ourselves.

Success in dealing with people depends on sympathetic grasp of the other person's viewpoint.

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.

Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do - it can make us identify with situations and people far away.

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

Walk a mile in my shoes is good advice. Our children will learn to respect others if they are used to imagining themselves in another's place.