George Savile Quotes

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.

How can you expect a man who's warm to understand one who's cold?

Well, I was a big fan of the book and therein a huge fan of the girl Precious. And so I felt like I knew this girl. I felt like I'd grown up alongside her. I felt like she was in my family. She was my friend and she was like people I didn't want to be friends with.

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.

It is human nature to imagine, to put yourself in another's shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy.

C'est vrai. Voilá quelqu'un qui sent comme moi. (It is true. There is someone who feels as I do).

The residuum of another's expression can never be related to one's own feeling.

I'm pouring my guts out so they can feel like your guts at the same time.

I don't think you have to like a character, but if you can understand why they do what they do, or the position they're in or why they make certain choices, then you can get behind them.

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.

It's good to have to put yourself in someone else's skin. It's all-consuming.

The story is a machine for empathy. In contrast to logic or reason, a story is about emotion that gets staged over a sequence of dramatic moments, so you empathize with the characters without really thinking about it too much. It is a really powerful tool for imagining yourself in other people's situations.

Sometimes I think to get to the emotional level of a scene, you don't necessarily have to have experienced the exact thing that person has experienced, but whatever you have in your life that has gotten you to that place is usually enough.

We do not learn by inference and deduction and the application of mathematics to philosophy, but by direct intercourse and sympathy.

Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.

I learnt pity, sympathy, and what it was like to be at the other end of the stick. Such lessons can't be learnt in lecture halls.

There would be no supporting life were we to feel quite as poignantly for others as we do for ourselves.

On 'Awkward,' we really like to send the message out that we're relatable, and that we get what people are going through.

Well, I think that if you sincerely try to imagine what life is like for another person - not in a mocking way, not in a satirical way, but in a sincere, compassionate way - I don't think that's exploitive.

I think that no matter how dark a person is, the more you learn about them, the more you understand about their life, the more you can sympathize with them or even root for them.

To read a character I'm not sympathizing with is generally quite a good, attractive proposition because I've got somewhere to go, I've got work to do, to try to understand why they behave like they behave, to relate entirely and understand them and to be completely emotionally connected. That is much more fun 99 percent of the time.

The thing that enchants me the most is the ability women have to feel other people's pain. The total empathy that women have is extraordinary.

Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.