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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.

Alan Lightman

Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free. Over time, some have determined that the only way to live is to die. In death, a man or a woman is free of the weight of the past [and the future].
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Cost Determine Free Future Immortality No Person Such Whole Woman
It’s the journeyto get there. It’s a way of thinking and it’s an intellectual curiosity, a desire to know how the world works, and to know what the fundamental principles of the world are, and to know our place in it.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Curiosity Fundamental Intellectual Journey Place Think
That’s an exciting thing. In a class of fifteen there are usually two very good writers, equal to good student writers anywhere in the country. Those two make the class wonderful.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Anywhere Class Equal Good Excite Student Thing Wonderful Writer
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
Don’t you feel something magical when you’re in love?… I do, I certainly do … but I think that feeling of magic is a hardwired psychological response. It’s a chemical thing in the brain.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Feel Love Magical Something
That someone else was speaking the words to me and I was just writing them down. It was a very strange experience. That can happen with a short book. I don’t think it could happen with a long book.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Book Down Experience Happen Shor Someone Speak Strange
And since the human mind has a degree of infinity and imagination unlikely to be matched by a machine for a very, very long time, I don’t think that we will become the machines of the machines.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Human Imagination Machine Match Mind Since Technology Unlikely
It’s a flow of chemicals and electrical currents, and it developed over millions of years in the process of evolution to aid in the procreation of the species.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Develop Evolution Million Procreation Species Write
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
And of course, that makes it frightening to start a new book because you can’t really depend upon what you’ve done with previous books.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Book Course Depend Done Frighten Make Previous
Except for a God who sits down after the universe begins, all other gods conflict with the assumptions of science.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Aftre Begin Down Ecept Gof Sit Universe
It’s exciting having a student who is not used to expressing their emotional side and bringing that out in them and see that developing and helping to nurture that.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Bring Develop Emotional Excite Express Nurture Side Student Use
Their predictions become postdictions- Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Illogic Justification Logic Postdiction Prediction
The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Happy Joy One Pain Stuck Time Tragedy World
Writers are a loosely knit community – community is an overstated word. Writers don’t see each other very much.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Community Lose Overstate Word Writer
For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable. While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Back Brood Doubt Look Movement People Predictable

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 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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Popular Authors

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