Chinua Achebe Quotes

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.

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.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

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

The great thing about fiction is you can talk about things without being didactic about them, but hopefully forge a connection with people and an understanding about a shared humanity that tells its own story.

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.

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.

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.

I do truly believe that the smallest stories can wind up being the biggest because it's through the specific that a writer can best access the universal.

The great thing about a song is that no one has to know your story. But if you tell it in a way that has clarity and means something to somebody else, then it can apply to their story.

Novels attempt to render human experience; that's really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.

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.

The strength of fiction is not in reading about yourself, but in reading about other people.

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

When a story is told really well and is real, even if it's not about their own lives, people can apply it to themselves.

Because I'm highly empathetic, it's easy for me to put myself in the character's shoes. It's, you know, finding the truth of the moment.

With every character, the first thing I want to feel is empathy.

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.

That's the power of fiction, that it can take the collective and make it personal.

Taking on different characters and seeing things through the eyes of different people is interesting to me. When I look at what people are going through in life, I try to understand their story.

One thing that I would like to get across is that even the most horrible events do have explanations that we can understand. And it's not always comfortable for us to understand, because in order to understand, we have to see how we're not so far away from the people in question.

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

When you relate to a disease, you're afraid. When you relate to a person, there is compassion. You see someone that is like you, that could be like you. You can see yourself in that same situation.

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.