Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.
From Barbara Kingsolver
What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.
When you pick up a novel from the bed side table, you put down your own life at the same time and you become another person for the duration.
I think the most interesting parts of human experience might be the sparks that come from that sort of chipping flint of cultures rubbing against each other. And living on the border between Mexico and the U.S. for so many years gave me a lot of insight into that.
It seems very safe to me to be surrounded by green growing things and water.
There's always a part of your nation's history that you haven't been told that... has a powerful impact on how you yourself may behave and may believe.
I'm not pretending to be ingenuous; I know what I'm doing.
I don't understand how any good art could fail to be political.
Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.
Being a novelist and being a mother have exactly coincided in my life: the call from my agent saying that I had a contract for my first novel - that was on my answering phone message when I got back from the hospital with my first child.
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