Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life.

I love developing children as characters. Children rarely have important roles in literary fiction - they are usually defined as cute or precious, or they create a plot by being kidnapped or dying.

These paintings say Mexico is an ancient thing that will still go on forever telling its own story in slabs of color leaves and fruits and proud naked Indians in a history without shame. Their great city of Tenochtitlan is still here beneath our shoes and history was always just like today full of markets and wanting.

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.

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