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I want to have compassion for my characters - I feel like I am the characters when I'm writing them.

I know when I go and see a writer, the first thing I think to myself is, 'Are they the character in the book?' You just can't help it; it's the way people are.

I've always had a compassion for characters in novels - the sense that they are, whatever they might think, living in a world that has a shape they don't know and can't finally alter.

I have a great deal of empathy for anyone who's having a hard time. I believe this ability to see another's viewpoint has served me well as a writer.

You have to have sympathy for and an empathy with a character in order to play them.

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

We seek to craft characters who inspire empathy: characters our audience will care for and, as a result, will care about what happens to them and thus will share the journey we have charted. A story, after all, is the character's journey.

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

The myth of writer as, like, Asperger-style misanthrope, or, like, the Jack Nicholson, 'As Good As It Gets' - it just doesn't work, because writers, in order to write good characters, need to understand people. You need to understand your audience. You need to have so much empathy you could almost encourage empathy in others.

When you're writing fiction, you're in every character 'cause you can't help it.