Salman Rushdie Quotes

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

The unique thing that literature provides is to be able to step so fully into another situation and condition.

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

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.

When you read about the lives of other people, people of different circumstances or similar circumstances, you are part of their lives for that moment. You inhabit their lives, and you feel what they're feeling, and that is compassion. If we see that reading does allow us that, we see how absolutely essential reading is.

I think the most important quality for a writer to have is empathy.

The beauty of literature is you allow readers to see things through other peoples eyes. All good books do this.

THE MAGIC AND THE DANGER OF FICTION IS THIS: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, and cry for people who do not, outside of the story, exist. There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.

Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.

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.

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.

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

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

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.

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.

Books allow you to see the world through the eyes of others.

Literature helps us transcend ourselves.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

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

When I hear other people's stories, I like to believe that they contribute to my 'Encyclopedia of Human Experience.' The stories I hear help me expand my definition of what love is, what pain feels like, what sacrifice means, what laughter can do.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

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.

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.