Gabriel Byrne Quotes

Once you allow yourself to identify with the people in a story, then you might begin to see yourself in that story even if on the surface it's far removed from your situation. This is what I try to tell my students: this is one great thing that literature can do - it can make us identify with situations and people far away.

Acting is the business of truth, so that we can see ourselves reflected back and learn.

Those who write about life, reflect about life. you see in others who you are.

You rehear your life by reading about what happens to other people.

You have to figure out who the right person is to tell the story. And often, people who are very self-aware will only sound as if they are pontificating if they tell the story.

Literature seems to offer lessons in human nature that help us decode the world around us and be better friends.

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 we read fiction, we want to get outside of ourselves and are able to see from a perspective we haven't seen through before. That can be very powerful.

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

I have labored carefully, not to mock, lament, or execrate, but to understand human actions

Taking on different characters and seeing things through the eyes of different people is interesting to me. When I look at what people are going through in life, I try to understand their story.

A helpful thing for me has always been - this is from a great acting teacher Declan Donnellan - is this beautiful way of expressing how and why people do things that other people may not do. It's a simple sentence that says, 'I understand you; you don't understand me.'

I see myself as a witness to humanity.

To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another's life.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

I do truly believe that the smallest stories can wind up being the biggest because it's through the specific that a writer can best access the universal.

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 would like to think that as a result of not just my own experiences, but at least being empathetic and compassionate about other people's experiences and plights and tragedies, that I am affected by it and learn from it.

As a writer and as a reader, I really believe in the power of narrative to allow us ways to experience life beyond our own, ways to reflect on things that have happened to us and a chance to engage with the world in ways that transcend time and gender and all sorts of things.

I try to make my books reflect humanity as I see it.

A man never discloses his own character so clearly as when he describes anothers.

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.

It's often difficult to get perspective on your own stories, on your own experiences, without talking them through with someone who is genuinely interested in thinking about them. And that's the key.

I like reading novels because it provides insight into human behavior.

One might say that the novel is the genre that most predisposes one to a profound insight into the tremendous life around us, instead of putting forward one's own tiny ego as the centre of the universe.