Madeline Kahn Quotes

If you take a lie and allow your desire for the truth, you'll end up with some truth - not fact, but something that gets you closer to the truth. That's what we want. When we go to a play, we need to be assured that the experience we're having.

In addition to giving comfort and joy, art also has the miraculous ability to let us live in other men's skins, to test our perceptions and beliefs against theirs, and perhaps to be changed as a result. It does this by portraying the world creatively, heightening our perception and enriching our understanding of things as they are.

When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination, the whole world opens up to you.

I'm excited about seeing things, and I'm interested in the way I think other people saw things.

I see myself as a witness to humanity.

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

It doubles your perception, to write from the point of view of someone you're not.

I think one of my better gifts as a writer is empathy.

As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.

In my writing, I focus lenses. I'm almost always seeing when I am writing.

If you would judge, understand.

Judgment is contained in the act of trying to understand.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.

Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he isn't. A sense of humor was provided to console him for what he is.

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.

All the things worth writing about are outside me. I'm a lens, not a source. And even if it's not always a comfortable journey, it's always a stimulating one.

I assume that we are all limited by our own brains and experiences and can only understand other people and other creatures through a kind of translation that brings them closer to us.

My mind has become somewhat like a book. What I mean by that is that when I look at the world, I see it as a story.

When you write, you take the ball and you hold it up to the light and you turn it slowly, and let people draw their own conclusions. And try to bring empathy to all sides of the equation.

Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.

O, would some Power give us, To see ourselves as others see us!

I see things with my own eyes, just as if they were the first eyes that ever saw, and then I set about to tell, as best I can, just what I've seen.

Literature allows us to be open, to listen, and to be curious.

George Saunders is the funniest. He makes me laugh in the way I want to laugh - with so much empathy and deep understanding of people. He illuminates things and people I've never thought about - and I've dedicated my life to the study of people and their idiosyncrasies. He is light years ahead.