Ruth Rendell Quotes

Empathy is much bigger than sympathy. When the character is empathised with, that means you have succeeded as an actor. So even if it's a villain, the audiences don't hate you... they understand why you have turned into a villain.

Nobody's really unsympathetic, I think. People do good and bad things. If a character's totally unsympathetic, they're not real and I'm not interested. Even the real monsters have to have a spark of something you can relate to.

Movies that encourage empathy are more effective than those that objectify problems.

You hope that when you're playing someone possibly unsympathetic that you can bring them something redeeming, something people can hang onto.

And that's the case with all of James McMurtry's songs. He never presents these characters for us to judge, but only to sympathize with. He has a capacity for compassion with every sketch that he makes with a person that he is not.

When your fear touches someone’s pain, it becomes pity, when your love touches someone’s pain, it become compassion.

The character is close to me, except that I haven't lived through those situations, so it's not completely me.

I have a lot of compassion for human beings in life experiences, so I allow myself to feel what these characters are feeling and don't have a problem accepting that.

We can empathize as deeply as we can empathize.

With my writing, what I want to do is humanize the young people I write about.

Empathy is the faculty to resonate with the feelings of others. When we meet someone who is joyful, we smile. When we witness someone in pain, we suffer in resonance with his or her suffering.

In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark. An invented figure like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary emerges fully into the light of understanding, which brings with it identification, sympathy and pity.

No matter how heinous someone's behaviour, if you make them a comic character, you can't expect people to hate them.

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.

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.

Above all, I try to create an emotion to which others can respond.

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

People aren't very good at other people's pain.

The irony is that I'm actually a very empathetic person, but I don't believe in sympathy at all.

Because I'm highly empathetic, it's easy for me to put myself in the character's shoes. It's, you know, finding the truth of the moment.

I do think you need to understand a character's motivation and perspective.

The first word that always came into my head with Henry VI was 'empathy.' He doesn't have a barrier between what other people feel and what he feels.

A character has to believe in himself, so I have to find a way to believe in them. Or at least sympathize to a degree.

Sympathy relies on a common experience. If you're clumsy, you might have sympathy for others who tend to bump into things. Empathy, on the other hand, is the ability to understand another person's feelings even if you've never experienced them yourself.

What's interesting to me is that people engage survivors from a place of pity all the time - a place of sympathy.