Elizabeth Berg Quotes

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

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.

Just to get the basic fundamentals and empathy - I think that's the most important thing to bring to it if you've acted in the past and are now a director: the empathy.

I think that good storytelling of any kind does promote a humility in that it encourages you to see the world the way that other people see it.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

My only job is to write in such a way that the reader gets a new handle on humanity.

The literary world is filled with good and generous people. But then that's what writing is all about - empathy.

I think the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others.

I think the most important thing when you're telling a story is to just tell the story as best as you possibly can.

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.

Poetry is partly sympathy, don't you think? If it's any good, it gets people to think about others' points of view.

One of the reasons I write is to be in other people's skin.

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.

Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.

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.

I see myself as a story teller.

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.

Literature delivers tidings of the world within and the world without.

That's what I love about acting and love and drama and art: that humanness we all share.

My career has been driven with the hope of telling stories, as it helps me to judge people less.

Telling your story is transformative. For both the storyteller and their audience, a new bridge to understanding is created.

How can you build something for someone else if you don't have enough familiarity with them to imagine the world through their eyes?

We will always need to be reminded that we are human. Art gives us that.

I see myself as a witness to humanity.

Not all poetry wants to be storytelling. And not all storytelling wants to be poetry. But great storytellers and great poets share something in common: They had something to say, and did.