Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

Art, when done well, creates empathy.

The best way to truly understand narrative art is to experience it.

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

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

Novels attempt to render human experience; that's really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.

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.

As a writer and as a reader, I really believe in the power of narrative to allow us ways to experience life beyond our own, ways to reflect on things that have happened to us and a chance to engage with the world in ways that transcend time and gender and all sorts of things.

A novel can enlarge the empathy and imagination of both its author and its reader, and my experience, that sense of enlargement is most intense when I'm transported beyond the narrow limits of my daily life.

Writers, not psychiatrists, are the true interpreters of the human mind and heart, and we have been at it for a very long time.

All art to me is an empathetic act. Whoever's telling a story is trying to transfer emotion into someone else.

Very broadly, literature concerns itself with the internal, cinema with the external.

Art makes us human, music makes us human, and I deeply feel that science makes us human.

It is literature which for me opened the mysterious and decisive doors of imagination and understanding. To see the way others see. To think the way others think. And above all, to feel.

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

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

Books give us insight into other people, other cultures. They make us laugh. They make us think. If they are really good, they make us believe that we are better for having read them. You don't read a book - you experience it. Every story opens up a new world.

Stories are not explanations of the world we live in. Science does that, and math does that. Our obligation as fiction writers is to enhance the mysteries.

I think art, especially literature, has the particular power to immerse the viewer or reader into another world. This is especially powerful in literature, when a reader lives the experience of the characters. So if the characters are human and real enough, then readers will feel empathy for them.

I think the whole glory of writing lies in the fact that it forces us out of ourselves and into the lives of others.

The unique thing that literature provides is to be able to step so fully into another situation and condition.

THE MAGIC AND THE DANGER OF FICTION IS THIS: it allows us to see through other eyes. It takes us to places we have never been, allows us to care about, worry about, laugh with, and cry for people who do not, outside of the story, exist. There are people who think that things that happen in fiction do not really happen. These people are wrong.

Storytellers broaden our minds: engage, provoke, inspire, and ultimately, connect us.

It is the function of art to carry us beyond speech to experience.

Fiction is the most joyous, beautiful, sophisticated, wonderful thing in the world.

As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor - those great tools of thought - and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world.