Edan Lepucki Quotes

What occurs to people when they read Kurt [Vonnegut] is that things are much more up for grabs than they thought they were. The world is a slightly different place just because they read a damn book. Imagine that.

It's strange because sometimes, I read a book, and I think I am the people in the book.

I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.

No matter how many people celebrate your gifts, don't ever think that you are more important to them than your gift is to them. This is why many people fail: They fail because they think that people came to follow them.

I think the most well-adjusted people live in the present with an eye toward the future - I'm not among those.

Whatever Kurt Vonnegut's ultimate status will be in the annals of literature, he was important to a lot of people right now. That's what most writers really care about.

When I talk about feminism and what I think the women's movement needs more of, it's not to detract from anything going on - I think everything going on is fantastic - but there's this missing element. I think we could learn from our detractors a little bit because I feel like they have a plan, a better understanding of things than we necessarily do. You can't change things if you don't understand the other people involved. And if you don't understand yourself, you'll never change.

I don't care what people think about me, I care what they think about themselves.

I try not to take things too personally, because most of the time, people aren't even thinking about anyone else but themselves.

As you care less about what people think of you, you will care more about what others think of themselves.

It's only recently that I've come to understand that writers are not marginal to our society, that they, in fact, do all our thinking for us, that we are writing myths and our myths are believed, and that old myths are believed until someone writes a new one.

I think people can find a breath and listen sometimes.

What a laugh, though. To think that one human being could ever really know another. You could get used to each other, get so habituated that you could speak their words right along with them, but you never know why other people said what they said or did what they did, because they never even know themselves. Nobody understands anybody.

I'm trying to cause people to be interested in the particulars of their lives because I think that's one thing literature can do for us. It can say to us: pay attention. Pay closer attention. Pay stricter attention to what you say to your son.

Most people don't relate to and can't generate concern for something they don't encounter personally or feel personally affected by. People have to have the palpable negatives in their lives dissected for them in ways that let them understand the root causes of unhealthy, unhappy conditions in their lives and then be allowed to really see and feel the positive alternatives.

I teach people to question their thinking, and this changes their world.

People must do what they must do. We all don't think alike or act alike and it's wrong to-to judge others by ourselves.

I think you can use fiction to get inside people's minds.

The value of a story isn't that it just has a narcotic effect. It's that it awakens something in you that makes you want to think, that makes you talk to other people, that stirs something that makes you examine the story that eventually turns into self-examination.

If you connect emotionally with the plight of those characters, ou feel what they feel and you walk away with a sense of understanding and empathy, and hopefully, something has been illuminated for you. And I tink that's what happendd for a lot of readers with my novels.

When I was 40, I used to wonder what people thought of me. Now I wonder what I think of them.

I enjoy telling these stories that I ultimately think get a disservice on a lot of network television. I enjoy getting people to change their perspective. I enjoy pushing myself into learning and understanding things from a very different point of view. It's scary to do that. It's scary to kind of put yourself in somebody else's position.

I think it just came with me evolving as a person and me understanding that it's not right to judge or to say anything derogatory about other people, especially if I don't know them.

Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world

If you're a person and care about other people - I don't think I have any sort of special understanding or anything, I think any feeling person would experience similar things if given the same opportunities to see the things I've been lucky enough to see and meet the people I've been lucky enough to meet.