Thomas Steinbeck Quotes

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

Telling your story is transformative. For both the storyteller and their audience, a new bridge to understanding is created.

The best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it's about us, it's about the reader.

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

You rehear your life by reading about what happens to other people.

You have to figure out who the right person is to tell the story. And often, people who are very self-aware will only sound as if they are pontificating if they tell the story.

I like reading novels because it provides insight into human behavior.

I think that good storytelling of any kind does promote a humility in that it encourages you to see the world the way that other people see it.

Readers are what it's all about, aren't they? If not, why am I writing?

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

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

My career has been driven with the hope of telling stories, as it helps me to judge people less.

I just wanted to tell good stories that helped explain the world to people.

A helpful thing for me has always been - this is from a great acting teacher Declan Donnellan - is this beautiful way of expressing how and why people do things that other people may not do. It's a simple sentence that says, 'I understand you; you don't understand me.'

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

You have to understand, my dears, that the shortest distance between truth and a human being is a story.

There was no short answer to this; like so much else, it was a long story. But what really makes any story real is knowing someone will hear it. And understand.

For me, I think it's such an important thing to hear other people's stories, because you do find ways that either you can learn something from them, or you can identify with something that they've gone through. You realize that maybe what you're going through in life isn't just specific to you, that somebody else understands it, or you talk to someone and all of sudden you see something in a completely different way because of what they've said to you or shared with you.

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.

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

Fiction is a particular kind of rhetoric, a way of thinking that I think can be useful in your life. It asks you to image the world through someone else's eyes, and it allows you to try to empathize with situations that you haven't actually experienced.

I believe that stories are incredibly important, possibly in ways we don't understand, in allowing us to make sense of our lives, in allowing us to escape our lives, in giving us empathy and in creating the world that we live in.

To share our stories is not only a worthwhile endeavor for the storyteller, but for those who hear our stories and feel less alone because of it.

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.