A Quote by Steven Pinker

Fiction is empathy technology.

Steven Pinker

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Empathy Fiction Technology

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Steven Pinker
Canadian - Scientist
Born: September 18, 1954

Writing fiction, like reading fiction, is a practice in empathy.

Jennifer Haigh

Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.

Leslie Jamison

Writing fiction is an act of imaginative empathy.

Andrew Sean Greer

Empathy is cloaked in our actions - as in, we might be experiencing empathy but not realize it's empathy.

Leslie Jamison

[A] science fiction story is one which presupposes a technology, or an effect of technology, or a disturbance in the natural order, such as humanity, up to the time of writing, has not in actual fact, experienced.

Edmund Crispin

Fiction and essays can create empathy for the theoretical stranger.

Barbara Kingsolver

History buffs expect historical background in historical fiction. Mystery readers expect forensics and police procedure in crime fiction. Westerns - gasp - describe the West. Techno-thriller readers expect to learn something about technology from their fiction.

Edward M. Lerner

Empathy and fellow feeling form the very basis of morality. The capacities for empathy, for feeling responsibility toward others and for reaching out to help them can be stunted or undermined early on, depending on a child's experiences in the home and neighborhood. It becomes too easy to turn our backs on fellow human beings... to have 'compassion fatigue.' Technology, we are learning, is not neutral.

Sissela Bok

Very little in science fiction can transcend the gimmickry of a technical conceit, yet without that conceit at its heart a book is not truly science fiction. Furthermore, so little emerging thought and technology is employed by sf writers today that the genre is lagging far behind reality both in the cosmology area and the technology area: sf is no longer a place to experiment, but is now very derivative.

Janet Morris

Science fiction is fantasy about issues of science. Science fiction is a subset of fantasy. Fantasy predated it by several millennia. The '30s to the '50s were the golden age of science fiction - this was because, to a large degree, it was at this point that technology and science had exposed its potential without revealing the limitations.

Raymond E. Feist

Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.

Neil Gaiman

I've always been fascinated by the brain. I wrote a lot about brain-tech in my first non-fiction book, 'More Than Human.' So when I decided to write science fiction, that was the technology I gravitated towards.

Ramez Naam

I embrace technology and I just think that in 1984 when James Cameron wrote about the technology, everyone thought he was totally way out there and it was science fiction. Now it's almost reality what he talked about. The machines have taken over, except they have not become self-aware, like in Terminator. So this is really one thing that we have to watch out for, but I think technology is good.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

I'm determined to disagree with people without being disagreeable. That's part of the empathy. Empathy doesn't just extend to cute little kids. You have to have empathy when you're talking to some guy who doesn't like black people.

Barack Obama

There's more to research than just looking up facts. Eventually, you have to make subjective calls. If you're writing a science fiction novel, there's probably some speculative technology in it. You'll have to decide how to project existing technology forward in a plausible way.

Andy Weir

Plays can create empathy. If you put a Muslim character on stage, and make him a full character, you're making it possible for the audience to feel empathy, and a little empathy on both sides would help.

Motti Lerner

A Quote by Steven Pinker

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