Ira Glass Quotes

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

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

Well-written novels make you more empathetic towards other people. You can identify with someone who isn't you. You can change your identity. A 14-year-old boy can become Anna Karenina. It is a miracle.

As authors, most - most authors, our art is portraying the human condition. Trying to show you what it's like to be somebody else, trying to make you feel for somebody else. That means you have to have a high degree of empathy.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

Taking on different characters and seeing things through the eyes of different people is interesting to me. When I look at what people are going through in life, I try to understand their story.

I just try to put myself in the minds of all the characters.

You need to be able to climb into a narrative and zip it up under your chin. You need to be able to see through the eyes of the hero, smell what he's smelling, hear what he's hearing.

With my writing, what I want to do is humanize the young people I write about.

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.

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

Well, I think that if you sincerely try to imagine what life is like for another person - not in a mocking way, not in a satirical way, but in a sincere, compassionate way - I don't think that's exploitive.

Many really good films allow us to empathize with other lives.

You have to have empathy, knowledge and compassion for your characters if you're a writer.

Besides, most of the books I like involve people I could never play in a million years.

Fiction's about what it is to be a human being.

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

I'm completely indifferent to what genre I read provided that I feel sympathy with how a writer perceives being alive in the world.

You have to have sympathy for and an empathy with a character in order to play them.

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.

I feel like people assume if a character is very different than you, that means it's difficult to get into their head or into their skin.

To write convincingly, I think you must be able to relate, in some way, to what a character is experiencing.

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

One of the great things about fiction is you can use an issue and describe it in human terms.

With every character, the first thing I want to feel is empathy.