I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie.
ALAN LIGHTMANWriters are a loosely knit community – community is an overstated word. Writers don’t see each other very much.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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I reached for some principle that had been subconscious in me and lifted it into consciousness.
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We’re plugged in 24 hours a day now. We’re all part of one big machine, whether we are conscious of that or not.
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If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
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A book, especially a longer book, it’s a different kind of force that pushes you through it. It’s a vision of the whole thing.
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We have a house on a very tiny island in Maine. Which is really my spiritual center. We’ve been going there for ten years, and it has no ferry service, no bridges, no telephone service. It’s really isolated.
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There is a cultural diversity that’s very valuable, and it’s valuable to have different ways of looking at the world.
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Nature is purposeless. Nature simply is. We may find nature beautiful or terrible, but those feelings are human constructions. Such utter and complete mindlessness is hard for us to accept.
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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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That has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact has become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent determination,
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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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I love the fact publishers are still publishing unprofitable material. It’s a challenge to the powers that be. It’s saying there is a real literature in this country and we will keep publishing it.
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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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In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.
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You’ve made something grand, but it will be grander if it has feeling and beauty and harmony.
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The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
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