John Green Quotes

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

When we read fiction, we want to get outside of ourselves and are able to see from a perspective we haven't seen through before. That can be very powerful.

What's a book? Everything or nothing. The eye that sees it all.

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

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

If you have distance from the events, then your story can work as an analogy or parable rather than its literal narrative.

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.

This is a much more fitting interpretation of the book than its modern interpretation.

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

All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.

A man never discloses his own character so clearly as when he describes anothers.

My job as an author - at least the way I think of it - is to make a story that is coded and puzzling enough to entice conversation and interpretation, but also to do the opposite: to make some things clear so that it is meaningful in some way, not just a random assemblage of ideas.

It's often difficult to get perspective on your own stories, on your own experiences, without talking them through with someone who is genuinely interested in thinking about them. And that's the key.

I think that when we look at something that's well acted and a story that's well told, it allows us to be a mirror of who we are as human beings and as a culture, and offers a glimpse of where we're headed.

I'm not going to get into the writer's skills or what he was trying to portray because that's not fair. I can only say what I felt was trying to be portrayed there.

I wanted to communicate what I had seen, so that others could see it.

As a reader, coming to my reading as a writer immersed in fairytales, I can't help but notice in so many stories, plays, poems that I read, the sort of breadcrumbs of fairytale techniques, so I'm very excited when I notice that.

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

Have you noticed in your past experience that your kind interpretations were almost always truer than you harsh one?

It absolutely helped - to write the father in both 'Juicy' and 'Beasts,' I had to see the whole story from his point of view. All of a sudden I understood more of what my own father must be going through - the fear, the frustration, the anger... the hope that he'll leave a legacy.

When you write, you take the ball and you hold it up to the light and you turn it slowly, and let people draw their own conclusions. And try to bring empathy to all sides of the equation.

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

Reading is as much a part of life as any part, and it's life itself. And it allows us to live other lives that we might not have lived if we hadn't picked up those books.

'Arcadia' is obviously a play that's got interesting things in it that are perhaps quite hard to grasp.

For solace, I love a book that opens up my perspective.