Joe Morton Quotes

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

When I write, I'm constantly putting myself in the position of someone else as I write using myriad voices; I think that's a life skill all people should learn.

All summer, I read fiction because you must read for the pleasure and beauty of it, and not only for research. I don't read thrillers, romance or mystery, and I don't read self-help books because I don't believe in shortcuts and loopholes.

In the ongoing celebration that is literature, we are asked to imagine ourselves as other selves, for better or worse.

When I try to understand somebody, create a character, I fall into them. When I think writers are telling me what to think, I get harrumphy.

I don't have to live the lives of my characters to write about them. It's about really putting yourself in their shoes.

There are technical tricks that may help you create more effective characters. My approach to characterization is not at all technical. I can't really analyze how I do it, but I am sure of one thing. To write convincing characters, you must possess the ability to think yourself into someone else's skin.

Part of being a fiction writer is being able to imagine how someone else is thinking and feeling. I think I've always been good at that.

To imagine yourself inside another person... is what a storywriter does in every piece of work; it is his first step, and his last too, I suppose.

I don't want to draw from my own experiences in life. I first like to become the character and then think from her point of view.

To try and imagine that I'm another person is always going to be hard - whether I'm writing about a truck driver or someone who is gay, who's trans, who is of a different ethnicity or creed. But it would be boring if I always had to write about myself and my limited viewpoint.

If I write a character, instead of looking from the outside, like maybe a journalist would, trying to describe them physically and figuring out what kind of things they might be interested in or have in their house, I don't really do it that way. I try to feel what it would be like to be inside this person, to be them.

What I try to do in writing any character is to put myself in his position.

The MFA program did one great thing for me: It taught me how to be a better reader and critic. Nothing I wrote during my time at Columbia remains - but learning how to really deconstruct a work of fiction - that, of course, is a permanent part of me now.

As a writer, it is always fun to imagine yourself in someone else's shoes.

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.

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.

I became, and remain, my characters' close and intent watcher: their director, never. Their creator I cannot feel that I was, or am.

You get to be wiser by storying the world and seeing it through other forms of consciousness than your own.

Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels, male as well as female.

Everyone has early fiction fantasies, but it wasn't until my second child Betsy was born that I allowed the urge to write a novel bubble up.

The move to creating stories was a natural progression for me, but the most pivotal time was probably in 6th grade: That year, a friend introduced me to the stories of Ray Bradbury, and a student teacher introduced me to creative writing.

The funny thing is that I feel close to all my characters. Deep, deep inside them all.

The great thing about writing is that you always put yourself in the shoes of the character. If you're doing it right, you can see into the heart of all your characters. Usually, when there's a writing problem, it's because you aren't doing that.