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I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.

Alan Lightman

It is true that the arts at MIT don’t have the same amount of funding or same status as the sciences or engineering.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Amount Art Engineer Fund Same Science Status True
If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Book Character Pilot Strangle
Children curse their parents for their wrinkled skin and hoarse voices. Those now old children also want to stop time, but at another time. They want to freeze their own children at the center of time.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Center Children Curse Parent Time Voice Wrinkle
I oppose any belief that contradicts experimental evidence as determined by the methods of science.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Belief Contradict Determine Evidence Experiment Method Oppose Science
It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Every Just Moment Speak Spoken Word World
Scientists will forever have to live with the fact that their product is, in the end, impersonal.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

End Fact Have Impersonal Live Product Scientist
In short, the body is a machine, subject to the same laws of electricity and mechanics as an electron or clock.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Body Clock Electricity Future Law Machine Person Same Short
I would do something and let it sit for three months… just brood about and decide I needed to slightly change something here or there. Or one character wasn’t quite right. But I think everybody goes through this.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Brood Character Direct Everybody Month Need Slight Something
It’s not necessarily a large number of people that affect the culture. You don’t count the number of influential voices, you weigh them. A hundred people can affect the culture.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Affect Culture Large Necessary Number People
Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened. But who could know? Who could know that the past is not as solid as this instant.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Decision Event Glance Happen Lose Occur Reality
All writers have roots they draw from – travel, work, family. My roots are in science and it is fertile ground for fiction.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Draw Family Root Travel Work Writer
The belief or disbelief in such a Being is therefore a matter of faith.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Being Belief Disbelief Faith Matter
I consider myself a spiritual atheist.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Atheist Consider Myself Spiritual
As both a scientist and a humanist myself, I have struggled to understand different claims to knowledge, and I have eventually come to a formulation of the kind of religious belief that would, in my view, be compatible with science.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Humanist Myself Scientific
Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Book Complete Different Reader Sense Something Way
Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Brain Electrical More Surge

I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.

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Popular Authors

I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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