A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation. For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable.
ALAN LIGHTMANIn fiction writing ideas have to be handled extremely carefully.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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.
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Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?
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I have always loved magic realism as a form of writing.
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We have become disembodied. By being always somewhere else we are nowhere.
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No one knows the nature of God, or even if God exists. In a sense, all of our religions are literary works of the imagination.
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Life is a vessel of sadness, but is noble to live life and without time there is no life. Others disagree.
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Music is, of course, a universal emotional experience, cutting across cultures and languages. I studied piano for ten years as a child and consider that experience one of the most valuable in my life.
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The book is finished by the reader. A good novel should invite the reader in and let the reader participate in the creative experience and bring their own life experiences to it, interpret with their own individual life experiences.
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Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational.
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Children grow rapidly, forget the centuries-long embrace from their parents, which to them lasted but seconds. Children become adults, live far from their parents, live their own houses, learn ways of their own, suffer pain, grow old.
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That’s the fine balance of a fiction writer…to be able to give your characters enough freedom to surprise you and yet still maintain some kind of artistic control.
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After a while the car becomes just another thing that he owns. Moreover, when his neighbor next door buys two cars, in an instant our man feels wretchedly poor and deprived.
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The Book of Telling tells of a woman’s journey to uncover the secret life of her father and to find herself in the process.
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With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great grandparents, great-aunts…and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice.
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Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
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They came back to the nest in the middle of April. They take separate vacations in the winter – the mother and father.
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I was in New York and had lunch with Oliver Sachs and compared notes with him – he is someone I really like.
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There are important differences which should be preserved, and in trying to do away with those differences we would lose something the same way as if we tried to make all religions one religion or all races one race.
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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.
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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.
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If I were not a writer, I would spend more time doing the things that I am already doing, which include doing research in physics, teaching, and running a nonprofit organization with a mission to empower women in Cambodia.
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I think that the scienti?c way of looking at the world, and the humanistic way of looking at the world are complementary.
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As a scientist, I don’t believe science will ever discover whether God exists. Nor do I believe religion will ever prove it.
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One metaphor for how we are living is that you see so may people with cell phones.
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I think people all over the institution recognize that different ways of understanding are valuable. Artists may think in a different way than biologists or chemists, but you can learn something from that.
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It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning.
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