Justin Cronin Quotes

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

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

There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding, above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have.

If you take a lie and allow your desire for the truth, you'll end up with some truth - not fact, but something that gets you closer to the truth. That's what we want. When we go to a play, we need to be assured that the experience we're having.

Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another.

One of the main reasons I write fiction is to try to understand what life is like for people other than myself, to try to see the world through my characters' eyes. I often find that I'm able to understand certain emotional truths about my own life by exploring things from different vantages.

I like reading novels because it provides insight into human behavior.

I don't think you have to have experienced things to understand them.

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.

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.

When you have a fresh point of view that comes from the right side of the heart, it's just so valuable. You can take it or not take it, but just that perspective can give you a lot of strength or make you reflect on a lot of things.

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

Literature delivers tidings of the world within and the world without.

Books teach children to see the world through the eyes of others and empathise with others. It's about the story.

When you start to develop your powers of empathy and imagination, the whole world opens up to you.

Because I'm highly empathetic, it's easy for me to put myself in the character's shoes. It's, you know, finding the truth of the moment.

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

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

How can you build something for someone else if you don't have enough familiarity with them to imagine the world through their eyes?

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

The beauty of literature is you allow readers to see things through other peoples eyes. All good books do this.

It is human nature to imagine, to put yourself in another's shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy.

Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.