I'm really interested in the pleasure we get from stories and the pleasure we get from movies, and certainly the pleasure we get from virtual experiences. My complaint is against empathy as a moral guide. But as a source of pleasure, it can't be beat.

And empathy is narrow; it connects us to particular individuals, real or imagined, but is insensitive to numerical differences and statistical data.

Something as important and central and encompassing as empathy can't be all bad. I think empathy plays a role in intimate relationships, where you might want your partner not just to care about you or understand you but to feel what you feel.

For the most part, people use "empathy" to mean everything good. For instance, many medical schools have courses in empathy. But if you look at what they mean, they just want medical students to be nicer to their patients, to listen to them, to respect them, to understand them. What's not to like? If they were really teaching empathy, then I'd say there is a world of problems there.

The effects of Twitter and Facebook and all those things on people's psychologies is a really interesting question to which nobody knows the answer.

Because of empathy, stories of the suffering of one person could lead us into a war that could kill millions of people.

When you start writing things to try to persuade someone who's not already part of your guild or your profession that something is interesting, it forces you to ask yourself, "Well, why is this interesting?"