Quotes About Empathy

My job is to form the people, the story, the sentences. Every reader will bring their own life and their own history to the story and shape it accordingly. I guess you can say it's like I am sending them a letter.

I'm very aware of the presence of a reader, and that probably is a reaction against a lot of poems that I do read which seem oblivious to my presence as a reader.

There's something to be said for an author who clearly respects a reader.

The best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it's about us, it's about the reader.

The pleasure a reader gets is often equal to the pleasure a writer is given.

But that private world, once it's dramatised, doesn't live again until it finds a reader.

A reader should encounter themselves in a novel, I think.

I like to be happy when I'm writing. If not, then how will the reader manage?

I like to believe, as a writer, that anybody who isn't a reader yet has just not found the right book.

I grew up writing thank-you notes. Real, honest-to-goodness, pen-and-ink, stamped and posted letters. More than simple habit, it's about what the commitment to expressing your thoughts and feelings in writing says about the character of the writer. About the joy such notes bring to the reader.

You never want to be in a position where your reader feels like you're passing judgment on your own characters. Any novel where you feel like the author is talking to the reader over the characters' heads is in a bad place.

If the reader is rooting for the protagonist, they'll forgive you just about everything else.

Write about what you care about. If you do that, you're probably going to do your best writing, reach off the page and touch the reader. How are you going to make the reader care if you don't care yourself?

What is missed when people talk about books is the moment of grace when the reader creates the book, lends it the authority of their life and soul. The books I love are me, have become me.

I would say if you want to write, write what you care about. I think that's the most important thing. I think if you write what you care about, you stand a better chance of having the reader care about your story.

I'm an insomniac, so my perfect reader is probably another insomniac.

I tend to spend a lot of time building characters that the reader will believe in and sympathize with.

I think the key is to give the reader characters they not only care about, but identify with, and to never take away all hope.

When you're writing, you think: How does intimacy happen in the work? You don't know who your reader is, woman, man, child, black person, Asian, who knows?

Empathy is not as complicated when you have some aspects in common with your character; it's not impossible to know someone who's like you in many ways but different in one. This is true especially if you are a reader. Reading makes you accustomed to inhabiting other lives and sensibilities.

I want to earn a reader's capacity to be moved.

I like the eclipses, the synaptic jumps of short stories. The reader has to participate very actively in the experience.

A novel can enlarge the empathy and imagination of both its author and its reader, and my experience, that sense of enlargement is most intense when I'm transported beyond the narrow limits of my daily life.

As a reader, I much prefer to read a book where people embody all kinds of ideas and everybody is making mistakes.