Arthur Phillips Quotes

People write fiction in their minds all the time - every time we read a 'human interest' news story, or a true crime tale, we find ourselves fascinated because we're trying to understand why people behave the way they do, why they make the choices they do, how we become who we become.

I'm interested in stories and the dark side of peoples' minds.

There is something in human beings that loves stories.

All the great novels, all the great films, all the great dramas are fictions that actually tell us the truth about us or about human nature or about human situations without being tied into the minutia of documentary events. Otherwise we might as well just make documentaries.

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

There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face.

I'm nosey, and I have a great imagination. So it's not necessarily things I have to go through, but it's things people I know or my family is going through, and I hear about it, and I think, 'That sounds like a great song.'

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another.

There are technical tricks that may help you create more effective characters. My approach to characterization is not at all technical. I can't really analyze how I do it, but I am sure of one thing. To write convincing characters, you must possess the ability to think yourself into someone else's skin.

If I'm talking to you, I can't see you, but I can see inside of you and what you're thinking. That's a mixed blessing.

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.

Fiction is all about vicarious experiences and getting into other people's heads in a way that no other art form lets you.

I am and always have been fascinated with people, and I have a very good time coming up with the narratives of people's lives, exploring how a person thinks and feels.

People just love stories.

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

I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction.

Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

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

It's a sad comment on humans that none of them are tolerable to one who can read their minds

But then every man is ludicrous if you look at him from outside, without taking into account what’s going on in his heart and mind.

No person can ever know everything that is in the heart of another. We are all Face Dancers in our souls.

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

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.

I think that fiction has a part to play in urging us, as a species, toward compassion.