George Pelecanos Quotes

Books teach children to see the world through the eyes of others and empathise with others. It's about the story.

Becoming a reader grows our horizons, our appetite for the good, the true and the beautiful, and our empathy.

What I do is I always try to educate myself about my neighbors, about the people I meet.

An open mind is prerequisite to an open heart.

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

For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time.

I don't think you have to have experienced things to understand them.

With every book, you go back to school. You become a student. You become an investigative reporter. You spend a little time learning what it's like to live in someone else's shoes.

Read a lot, live your life, and listen and watch, so that your mind fills up with millions of images.

A film can open hearts and minds that have been closed, for whatever reasons.

If you don't open your eyes to other people's lives, you can't even begin to understand how the world works at all.

A love of reading shows empathy, the desire to understand how others live or act or might act - and why.

Be kind. It's worthwhile to make an effort to learn about other people and figure out what you might have in common with them. If you allow yourself to be somewhat curious - and if you get into the habit of doing that - it's the first step to being open minded and realizing that your points of view aren't totally opposite.

My trademark at CNN was really asking insightful questions and making sure people are understanding the connections in humanity, and I think that is the core of education.

Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage point.

If you can't read, the only thing you can do is enjoy the pictures, not the whole story. Reading is the key to knowledge. Knowledge is the key to understanding. So read on, young man! Read on, young lady!

One of the fantastic things about books, fiction or non-fiction, is the way they give you a chance to look into different lives.

I think you accidentally learn things in high school that turn out to be life lessons when you are able to step back a bit and study them in more depth.

If you read literature, you put yourself in somebody else's shoes. You learn from great figures in literature.

I would like to think that as a result of not just my own experiences, but at least being empathetic and compassionate about other people's experiences and plights and tragedies, that I am affected by it and learn from it.

Culture means, I think, that you have widened your experience enough through reading and through being a little bit thoughtful about these things that it has changed your outlook in some ways. And not necessarily made you a better human being but made you see things.

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.

People who don't read seem to me mysterious. I don't know how they think or learn about other people. Novels are a very important part of our education.

If we treasure our own experience and regard it as real, we must also treasure other people's experience.

To the extent that we are all educated and informed, we will be more equipped to deal with the gut issues that tend to divide us.