Don Miguel Ruiz Quotes

Understanding POV is essential, or ought to be.

When you use the form of a novel, and you say 'I,' you are also saying 'I' for someone else. When you say 'you,' you are simultaneously in your room writing and in the outside world - you are seeing and being seen seeing, and this creates something slightly strange and foreign in the self.

You want, in a sense, to relate to the main character, so often, the main character POV is a bit more of a blank slate.

Stories teach us empathy. They reveal to us ourselves in the skins of others.

It's so easy to get caught up in your own experiences. They can seem so important. But there are billions and billions of other experiences going on.

It's really hard to see yourself and to recognize that you are a human being like everybody else. You just think everybody's judging you.

It doubles your perception, to write from the point of view of someone you're not.

You rehear your life by reading about what happens to other people.

Approaching a part or thinking about taking a part, I never think, 'Is that person like me?'

I don't know what other people are like, I haven't been able to crawl inside anybody else.

We appear to be programmed with the idea that there are 'things' outside of our self, and some are conscious, and some are not.

I assume that we are all limited by our own brains and experiences and can only understand other people and other creatures through a kind of translation that brings them closer to us.

Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.

Writing is weaponized empathy. It's putting yourself in someone else's head. It's finding what's in them that relates to you.

The main character in the book is usually someone you're identifying with because the story is being told through this person's mind.

I will never actually be able to know what it's like to go through life in someone else's body.

I'm trying to use myself and my own flawedness as a metaphor for general human experience. I'm trying to 'stand next to' a subject, whether it's Bobby Knight or Vince Carter, and use that subject to meditate on both him and me.

To tell your story, you have to include others.

I can't write about someone who is unlike me in all senses-physically, emotionally and socially.

I think as long as I can tell you a story about people that you understand, it doesn't matter if you don't like what they do; you understand why they did it.

Empathy begins with understanding life from another person's perspective. Nobody has an objective experience of reality. It's all through our own individual prisms.

That's what I love doing - understanding another person's perspective that's really different from mine. To me, it's like an emotional puzzle, trying to figure out the humanity of a character who is very different from myself and why they think the way they do.

The greatest tragedy for any human being is going through their entire lives believing the only perspective that matters is their own.

I am a songwriter and producer, and though you have to be personal in everything you do, you always having to look at things from another's perspective.

Everybody wanted to be the hero of their own story. Nobody wanted to be comic relief.