Carmen Cusack Quotes

I try to make my books reflect humanity as I see it.

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.

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

Art curates compassion. Art to me breaks down walls and allows us to step into somebody else's shoes.

Everything was a song. Every conversation, every personal hurt, every observance of people in stress, happiness and love... if you could feel it, I could feel it. And I could write a song about it.

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

In addition to giving comfort and joy, art also has the miraculous ability to let us live in other men's skins, to test our perceptions and beliefs against theirs, and perhaps to be changed as a result. It does this by portraying the world creatively, heightening our perception and enriching our understanding of things as they are.

That's what I love about acting and love and drama and art: that humanness we all share.

People treat serious subjects so seriously, which is so obvious a way of dealing with them. I'm always thinking that the best way of dealing with them is to show people as human beings.

Just to get the basic fundamentals and empathy - I think that's the most important thing to bring to it if you've acted in the past and are now a director: the empathy.

I think the most important quality for a writer to have is empathy.

Music, like film, is an incredible tool for creating empathy.

Art, when done well, creates empathy.

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

Art is about trying to find the good in people, and making the world a more compassionate place.

I see myself as a witness to humanity.

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.

Art is about profundity. It's about connecting to everything that it means to be alive, but you have to act.

I think one of my better gifts as a writer is empathy.

I think what makes us human - is our interconnectedness among people. It's our ability to form and maintain relationships. It's the barometer by which we call ourselves human.

The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.

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

I wouldn't be able to do the songs as long as I've been doing if I didn't feel the pulse of the world. But I can feel people and I know what they want. I feel like I know how they are, because I am the people. And I just have a gift.

I think that's what poetry does. It allows people to come together and identify with a common thing that is outside of themselves, but which they identify with from the interior.

What moves me in art is how we question who we are as people.