Susan Burton Quotes

You can spin stories out of the ways people understand and misunderstand each other.

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.

My only job is to write in such a way that the reader gets a new handle on humanity.

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

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 just want people to hear me and my story.

Storytelling is about listening in any media.

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?

I love how a story can help someone discuss something they otherwise would not.

Now more than ever we need to talk to each other, to listen to each other and understand how we see the world, and cinema is the best medium for doing this.

Writing, basically breaks down to relationships between people and that is what you write about.

I love sharing my stories and experiences with people and connecting to them on both a humorous and emotional level.

I really enjoy connecting with the audience.

To tell your story, you have to include others.

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

You've seen things through my eyes.

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.

Love is reaching out to try to get to the other person.

I'm a conduit for telling people's stories. It's a privilege.

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

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.

You have to walk in the other guy's moccasins. You have to think what they think. If you want to bring somebody onto your side, you have to figure out what motivates them. What do they need?

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.