Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

It's a funny thing: people often ask how I discipline myself to write. I can't begin to understand the question. For me, the discipline is turning off the computer and leaving my desk to do something else.

When people are frightened about going hungry and paying their mortgages, a scarcity model begins to prevail; they fear someone else will get their piece of the pie.

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

I now understand more clearly than I ever had before why you won in November 1980 and I lost.