Julie Kagawa Quotes

Good characters don't believe they're bad. As long as you as an actor believe in them and try to understand them, it's not hard to have empathy and sympathy.

Anytime you take on a character... you just have to find the parts of the character that you can understand.

When I step into a character's shoes, I don't judge them. I make a conscious effort not to look from the outside in but look from the inside out, and when you do that it allows you to feel and sense things more, and act and react from a core, you know?

My characters are always utterly sympathetic to me, if that makes any sense.

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

In all my characters, I try to find an iota of myself, and in Castle, I found a lot. He gets away with a lot, so that's fun.

It always helps me connect with characters, to think about what music they respond to.

In terms of the characters I think are really fun to play, a lot of times it's someone in my head saying 'I know that woman.'

But I always wanted my characters to be more than cyphers for the failings of their world. And I never had to look too hard to find a part of myself in them.

I like reading novels because it provides insight into human behavior. I am really interested in feelings and think they are what define us as a species. When you really get it right in acting, it's an act of empathy. You feel less distant from others, and that is really exciting.

I think my job is hopefully to connect with people emotionally and to feel less alone or understand things in a certain way.

I think the idea is to try and understand everything about the characters and where the character is coming from, from their point of view, why they say what they do. And not, 'Oh, but I would never say that. Why does the character say that?' But then making it as personal as possible.

I wanted to live the inner life of every man I saw, look at the world through his eyes.

I don't know what other people are like, I haven't been able to crawl inside anybody else.

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.

You have to have sympathy for and an empathy with a character in order to play them.

At the end of the day, you have to find the humanity in you in each character.

You can't understand a character intellectually, you have to become one with its emotional core.

A love of reading shows empathy, the desire to understand how others live or act or might act - and why.

It helps to be more interested in other people than you are in yourself. Inhabiting other characters is what I do.

I always at least try to come from some sort of human place no matter how ridiculous the character is. That's really awesome. That is more the work that I'm leaning towards doing.

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

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

My characters are always utterly sympathetic to me.

I actually see myself in all my characters. In order to imagine what it feels like to be another person I have to use my own experiences and responses to the world.