Jhumpa Lahiri Quotes

I like all my characters in one way or another, or at least I 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.

What I try to do in writing any character is to put myself in his position.

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.

Fiction challenges us and works its miracles by placing us in the skin of another human being and teaching us empathy.

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

I feel like songwriting is an experiment in empathy.

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

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.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

To imagine yourself inside another person... is what a storywriter does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.

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

The joy of great fiction is that it transports the reader to another world, where new characters live in otherwise unimaginable ways. It is one of the most powerful ways of generating empathy that I know.

My job is to see the world through the character's eyes.

I don't believe people are interested in dates and facts. I don't think it is interesting to say what it is to be this person or that, but I do believe it is entertaining and perhaps even of value to express how it is to be that person.

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.

I think one of the hardest things about doing a book in the first person is that to a certain extent each day, when you begin to do your work, you're climbing into somebody else's skin.

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.

Writing fiction is a good way to inhabit other minds, if not other lives.

Fiction is a particularly effective way for strangers to connect across time and distance

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.

The job of reading is to use stories as a way into seeing other people as we see ourselves

That's the wonderful thing about drama and writing and fiction: it's this wonderful shared experience that we all have. We can see into each other's lives.