empathy through storytelling Quotes

If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don't feel the pain of others because they haven't imaginatively got under their skins.

the wrongs of society can be more deeply impressed on a large class of readers in the form of fiction than by essays, sermons, or the facts of science.

I felt so much when I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, I felt everything. I didn't understand [myself], I was so happy yet so angry and sad. That was the point when I realized that I needed to tell stories and make characters come alive and I needed to make people cry, and make people angry, and make people happy, and make them laugh.

I believe sharing stories and experiences is the best way to teach people to empathize!

So I decided to make a film about our need to tell stories, to own our stories, to understand them, and to have them heard.

Stories are medicine. They have such power; they do not require that we do, be, act anything - we need only listen.

...at it's best fiction is medicine.

Human beings are complicated and flawed and unique, but we all have a story to tell. Gone are the days where our lead characters can only look like somebody else. Heroes look like all of us. We see ourselves in each others' stories. We see who we are. We see who we want to be. Sometimes we see who we don't want to be. And through that we have a greater understanding of ourselves and acceptance of each other.

Writing stories, adopting other characters, making up fantastic stories and tales, this is a way of perhaps enhancing who I am. Writing stories takes a commonplace old life and makes it all somehow more interesting. And hopefully I can do that in a way that touches a lot of people in their lives, too.

Entertainment is all about helping people feel things that they might not have access to normally. They watch something and it makes them feel something, and that makes them reflective about their own life, you know?

Writing grew out of the pleasure of escape. My novels are very much outside of my personal experience. That is why I love writing fiction. It allows me to leave my existence and inhabit other lives.

Fiction is truth. I think fiction is the truest thing there ever was. My whole effort is to remove that distinction. The writer is the midwife of understanding. It's very important for me to tell politics like a story, to make it real.

Fiction offered me tools that allowed me to approach a wider variety of issues than the events of my own life would.

I believe that written stories will continue to survive because they answer an essential human need. I think movies might disappear before the novel disappears, because the novel is really one of the only places in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.