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I don't really distinguish between sympathy and honesty when I'm writing. The two go together - I'm interested in inhabiting my characters, seeing the world through their eyes.

The easiest way for readers to connect with characters and feel sympathy is to make the character entertaining, sympathetic and likeable.

Sympathy is charming, but it does not make up for pain.

It's important to find characters that share sympathy with a young audience, not just in the story but their role in the world.

Although I'm not particularly troubled myself, I do have a lot of empathy for troubled characters.

I've always thought of acting as more of an exercise in empathy, which is not to be confused with sympathy. You're trying to get inside a certain emotional reality or motivational reality and try to figure out what that's about so you can represent it.

I don't like sympathetic characters.

There's a great tradition of actors taking on parts of much less obvious sympathy.

It's not very interesting to establish sympathy for people who, on the surface, are instantly sympathetic. I guess I'm always attracted to people who, if their lives were headlines in a newspaper, you might not be very sympathetic about them.