Quotes About Empathy

My only job is to write in such a way that the reader gets a new handle on humanity.

Let me put it this way. There is more to acting than just acting like somebody. I like to act in such a way that other people get some notion of what it's like to be somebody.

I just hope I reach out to people and connect to people in such a way that they continue to support what I do.

One of the big conversations I'm trying to have onstage right now is that to be pro-woman, you don't have to be anti-man. Saying all men suck makes you look like an idiot. And it's not helpful.

All I can say to people who don't think depression is a real thing, or say 'just suck it up and get over it' - they just really have no idea. You have to give people the benefit of the doubt that they're doing the best they can to get through it.

I want to stay hungry. I really believe my resources are best used to help projects that make the world suck less.

I really wanted people to understand beating the stigma of, Hey suck it up,' is really important, because it's not as easy as that.

I was in a band in Auckland, and I remember they all hated me. They had a big intervention. They said, basically, 'Gin, we think you suck.' I was miserable. I cried and cried. But looking back, that taught me about social skills and how to communicate with musicians.

I'm not that great of a speaker. I don't like watching my own interviews. I think I suck at talking, but one thing I can do is move my pen, and if that's how I gotta speak to my daughter, then let me do that.

As far as children out there that hate their moms and dads, just get over it, because you get one dad and one mom. You know, suck it up. Learn something.

At 12 years old, I raised a premature baby cow on our farm because her mom had died. I bottle-fed it every day, let it suck on my chin, and babied it until it was stable.

I want to know why I read as a child with such a frantic appetite, why I sucked the words off the page with such an edge of desperation.

I think it's important if you are an actor, if you are portraying human life, you have to connect with what is human. It's not easy if you spend a lot of time in L.A. and get sucked into the hedonism of the industry.

In middle school, you're figuring out how you're affecting people, and sometimes you're affecting people negatively. And what sucks is that it can affect people for their whole lives. I didn't realize I was a part of that.

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

Fans - they want to see results. I've been a fan before. I get it. But I see the bigger picture, too. I would never say an athlete sucks after they've been good, because you don't know what they're going through. They might be going through something that they can't shake.

It sucks, being perceived as a person that you're not; it sucks being hated.

Chimps are very quick to have a sudden fight or aggressive episode, but they're equally as good at reconciliation.

I think we all have a selfish gene which rises to the top, sometimes. But then we're also all capable of a sudden magnanimity.

If you look up, and you see that all of a sudden the world is really coming down on people with brown hair, I would think the people with black hair would look at that and go, 'Well, that could be me, and so, I shouldn't stand for that any more than those people with brown hair stand for it.'

The fine line between roaring with laughter and crying because it's a disaster is a very, very fine line. You see a chap slip on a banana skin in the street and you roar with laughter when he falls slap on his backside. If in doing so you suddenly see he's broken a leg, you very quickly stop laughing and it's not a joke anymore.

Way back in the 1970s, I was eating a steak, and I looked down, and for the first time it suddenly looked like flesh to me - like a dead creature. In a flash, I realized that every time I ate any kind of meat, something had been killed for me, and I stopped eating all animals, not just cows and pigs but chickens and fish.

I hate Alzheimer's. It is one of the most awful things because, here is a loved one, this is the woman or man that you have loved for 20, 30, 40 years, and suddenly, that person is gone. They're gone. They are gone.

That scene in 'The Purge' where my kids, Mary's kids, are in danger was really crazy for me, because I suddenly... I have my methods as an actor, so I went to the place of 'If somebody came near my children, with bad intent?'