Paula Fox Quotes

Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.

When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination, the whole world opens up to you.

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

I believe that the imagination is the passport we create to take us into the real world. I believe the imagination is another phrase for what is most uniquely us.

My job as an artist, as I see it, is to understand and in some cases to take on various ways of thinking about people and the world that are different from my own, sometimes radically different.

Empathy is the most mysterious transaction that the human soul can have, and it's accessible to all of us, but we have to give ourselves the opportunity to identify, to plunge ourselves in a story where we see the world from the bottom up or through another's eyes or heart.

Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else's shoes for a while.

The man who can put himself in the place of other men, who can understand the workings of their minds, need never worry about what the future has in store for him.

Imaginative empathy is one of the great gifts that humans have, and it means that we can live more than one life. We can picture what it would be like from another perspective.

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

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.

Walk a mile in my shoes is good advice. Our children will learn to respect others if they are used to imagining themselves in another's place.

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

I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.

Literature helps us transcend ourselves.

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.

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.

Writing is weaponized empathy. It's putting yourself in someone else's head. It's finding what's in them that relates to you.

I think it's so important that, if I'm writing about the real world, I stay true to it. I think that kids do compartmentalize, and they're hopefully able to see it from a safe place of their own lives and, through that, learn something about empathy.

When I write, it's like choosing which shoes I'm going to put on. More often than not, my lyrics are personal - but I sometimes have to put myself in other people's shoes.

That's always what I've tried to do. I've tried to communicate. But at the end of the day, it's still for you to understand something. Understand that the world is bigger than you.

I think the therapeutic part of acting is allowing myself to step into another human being's shoes. It allows me the ability to release judgment, if I had any judgment to begin with. It's an opportunity to understand rather than to stand outside and point fingers.

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

Empathy begins with understanding life from another person's perspective. Nobody has an objective experience of reality. It's all through our own individual prisms.

That's what I love doing - understanding another person's perspective that's really different from mine. To me, it's like an emotional puzzle, trying to figure out the humanity of a character who is very different from myself and why they think the way they do.