Anthony McCarten Quotes

Even if someone doesn't look like you or you don't know people like this in your real life, you get to know them and you get to see their humanity and you get to empathize with them. Our hope is that through empathy that can spark change. We hope people start talking to each other and our show sparks conversation because we need to start talking to each other, not at each other.

It's populated by people who, by and large, have terrific communication skills. Every day is an extraordinary day. For me, it was just a great area for storytelling.

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

It's great to express yourself and tell other people's stories and get into the minds of people who aren't like you.

I want to write a book that makes people debate, and makes people think, interact with each other and exchange ideas... I write because I'm engaged in this big conversation.

That's what you want art to do, to open people up and start conversations.

I'm interested in character and dialogue and exchange of ideas.

Writing, basically breaks down to relationships between people and that is what you write about.

I believe in communication; books communicate ideas and make bridges between people.

It is stories - both real and fictional - that can captivate hearts, change minds and, in the most powerful examples, spur action.

If it is not possible for me to go somewhere and to be willing to encounter people with different views, then I'm really not doing my job.

We need to understand the other side to impact the other side. We become much more effective as humans and leaders when we engage in hearty conversations with those who are different from us, not necessarily to change our opinions, but to build the empathy muscle.

We have privilege in our hands as storytellers. We need to tell stories that reflect our world.

I've always been interested in listening to people's stories.

Telling stories and having them received is so important. That dialogue is everything. I tell my students all the time that what separates us as human beings is our ability to hold stories. Our narrative history. There is so much power in that. Storytelling is our human industry.

As an editor, you're constantly dealing with the best way to convey an exchange between two people. So when I'm shooting, I'm just aware in the back of my head what an editor might want.

Stories are verbal acts of hospitality.

I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction.

The joy of writing drama is putting yourself into different people's heads.

Conversation is an abandonment to ideas, a surrender to persons.

I write at eighty-five for the same reasons that impelled me to write at forty-five; I was born with a passionate desire to communicate, to organize experience, to tell tales that dramatize the adventures which readers might have had. I have been that ancient man who sat by the campfire at night and regaled the hunters with imaginative recitations about their prowess. The job of an apple tree is to bear apples. The job of a storyteller is to tell stories, and I have concentrated on that obligation.

Why write stories? To join the conversation.

Dreaming is the day job of novelists, but sharing our dreams is a still more important task for us. We cannot be novelists without this sense of sharing something.

It's important to tell your story. It's important to listen.

I don't just want to talk to the choir. I want to sit down and be respectful of the people who are most unlike me, to get them to hear me and think. It doesn't mean you're going to change them right there, but just so they can hear you and what you're saying.