Quotes About Empathy

As you live with a character longer, you claim more ownership over it. You become more defensive of it. It becomes like a person that you know.

I guess, as an actor, you have to bring something personal to the character - you've got to identify and love one element of the character, or else you can't really inhabit and find ownership.

There is no delight in owning anything unshared.

If I'm going to hand over my classic Italian sports car, and you're going to be driving it down Pacific Coast Highway with the top down, while I watch, I want to be certain that I'm adequately compensated for the pain of that vision.

My mother used to pack me Filipino food for lunch, and I would get made fun of because of the way it smelled. Kids would make fun of me because of the way I looked and call me 'Ling Ling.'

No one is asking for an Oprah in Chief. Anyhow, Obama is too chilly by nature ever to be convincing as a human care package.

My wife was gone, all other girls failed to cooperate, so I decided to wear a pouch of animal blood myself and test out my pads by wearing them myself. The discomfort I felt for those five days cannot be explained in words; I bow to every woman on earth for going through this every month.

When we're onstage, it's like mind reading: we're on the same page.

Words on the page don't have the same impact as somebody saying the words to you.

I've always thought that one of the least successful encounters is meeting a writer one admires. For one thing, writers are generally much kinder, more empathetic, more generous people on the page than they are in person.

Whether it is television or film, the character on the page has to speak to me.

I think, a lot of times, we find ourselves in a relationship where we are on two different pages.

There's a fullness that happens when someone is focussed on you. For me, if I'm being fully looked at and paid attention to and seen, I'm filled up by that.

Shared joy is increased, shared pain is lessened.

Life is hard. It is. And it's like, I don't want anybody feeling any pain.

I'm mindful not to get too self-pitying or too revealing of my own pain.

It is almost the definition of a gentleman to say that he is one who never inflicts pain.

Pain is real when you get other people to believe in it. If no one believes in it but you, your pain is madness or hysteria.

For me, artists are the world's pain receptors. That is why they have such a hard time living.

The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness than the destruction of millions of our fellow-beings.

Hush! Check those words. Do not cure ill with ill and make your pain still heavier than it is.

Nothing can make you more humble than pain.

I'm always more motivated by the pain of a funny character than by what makes him funny.

In the country of pain we are each alone.