Adam Curtis Quotes

The radio is good for taking somebody else's experience and making you understand what it would be like. Because when you don't see someone, but you hear them talking - and, uh, that is what radio is all about - it's like when someone is talking from the heart. Everything about it conspires to take you into somebody else's world.

I feel like songwriting is an experiment in empathy.

The story is a machine for empathy. In contrast to logic or reason, a story is about emotion that gets staged over a sequence of dramatic moments, so you empathize with the characters without really thinking about it too much. It is a really powerful tool for imagining yourself in other people's situations.

To think, and to feel, constitute the two grand divisions of men of genius - the men of reasoning and the men of imagination.

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.

My approach as an actor has always been the same, in that the greatest gift that you're ever going to have is your imagination because you're not going to have all life experiences. So you draw on things that are sort of close to it but you spend your time expanding on it or drawing something specific on whatever your situation is.

I used to watch the world as if it was a performance and I would realize that certain things that people did moved me, and certain things didn't move me, and I tried to analyze, even at that age, six and seven and eight, why I was moved by certain things they did.

You use your emotions to try and find them in the character that you're playing.

My view was that the campaign had been a sacred thing, that it had been a real compact, because I was there and I saw the connection that Clinton made with people, and the connection that they made with him.

Writing really evokes empathy in a way very few things can do.

I like making people feel things. Acting doesn't seem like lying but like storytelling.

My job is about emotion. My job is about feeling. This might be controversial to say, but I feel like sometimes data gets in the way of that.

Actors actually have a feeling, like a sixth sense. They are like mediums. But it only works - you can only become this medium or this vessel to transport emotions and images and feelings - if you are not too full of yourself. Otherwise, there wouldn't be space for a story to live inside of you or a world to evolve in you and around you.

I am extremely left brain dominant, probably 95%-5%. The feeling side of my brain is not really strong.

We have to be able to use our imaginations to make the character's experiences real to us.

Writing fiction, like reading fiction, is a practice in empathy.

People don't care how you feel. You need to paint pictures, you need to tell stories. That's what people want. They want to be entertained. Then all of the other stuff kind of filters across as part of the whole thing.

I've thought a lot about the power of empathy. In my work, it's the current that connects me and my actual pulse to a fictional character in a made up story, it allows me to feel, pretend feelings and sorrows and imagined pain.

All the preparation in the world doesn't avail you if you can't make that imaginative leap and put yourself in the position of the characters you've created, to imagine what it's like to be somebody else.

I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.

George Bernard Shaw said that thinking was the greatest of all human endeavors, but I would say that feeling was. Allowing yourself to feel things, to feel love or wrath, hatred, rage.

There's a kind of acting that goes on in my head when I'm writing a character where I put myself in their place.

Literature and film have a way of lifting you from your own existence and transporting you to some foreign place and putting you in the shoes with an experience different than your own.

Empathy doesn't require that we have the exact same experiences as the person sharing their story with us...Empathy is connecting with the emotion that someone is experiencing, not the event or the circumstance.

Connecting to something keeps our empathy alive.