Sue Monk Kidd Quotes

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.

As authors, most - most authors, our art is portraying the human condition. Trying to show you what it's like to be somebody else, trying to make you feel for somebody else. That means you have to have a high degree of empathy.

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

Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.

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.

The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.

Sympathetic characters usually have a voice. They usually don't have any trouble being heard.

Besides, most of the books I like involve people I could never play in a million years.

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

I'm completely indifferent to what genre I read provided that I feel sympathy with how a writer perceives being alive in the world.

To write convincingly, I think you must be able to relate, in some way, to what a character is experiencing.

One of the great things about fiction is you can use an issue and describe it in human terms.

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.

Part of the beauty of fiction is that we come alive in a body that we don't own.

With my writing, what I want to do is humanize the young people I write about.

I always find stuff in my characters to relate to.

But I think, and hope, that the novels can be understood and enjoyed as science fiction, on their own terms.

My approach as an actor has always been the same, in that the greatest gift that you're ever going to have is your imagination because you're not going to have all life experiences. So you draw on things that are sort of close to it but you spend your time expanding on it or drawing something specific on whatever your situation is.

In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained, but because they feel something else will happen; that the experience will take them beyond themselves and show them something they haven't seen before.

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.

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.

A novel can enlarge the empathy and imagination of both its author and its reader, and my experience, that sense of enlargement is most intense when I'm transported beyond the narrow limits of my daily life.

Writing and reading fiction is, I think, a human effort to make sense of the world.

Many really good films allow us to empathize with other lives.