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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

Like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Air Begin Breathe Central Existence Intelligent Like Passage Time
A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life. That’s a sign of a good novel.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Book Change Different Every Few Good Life Own Place Year
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
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
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
Each person knows that somewhere is recorded the moment she was born, the moment she took her first step, the moment of her first passion, the moment she said goodbye to her parents.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Born Movement Parent Passion Person Record Somewhere
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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Book Creative Finish Good Let Novel Participate Raeder
Franz Kafka is an idea person. His books begin and end in ideas. Ideas have always been important to me in my writing.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Always Been Begin Book End I Idea People Person Portrait Write
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
Science is an intellectual journey, and to me, it’s not the destination.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Destination Intellectual Journey Science
I would bet most people don’t have thirty minutes in a day where they can just sit down and think. Or maybe they don’t have to be sitting, they can be walking.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Down Maybe Minute People Sit Think
Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Acid Bit Cerebellum More Sadness Transfix
So it’s really about two and a half months that I’ll feel like I can recover some silence in my life…which is so hard to find.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Feel Hard Life Month Really Silence Two
We try to connect. We try to find truth. We dream and we hope. And underneath all of these strivings, we are haunted by the suspicion that what we see and understand of the world is only a tiny piece of the whole.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Connect Dream Haunt Hope Thing Tiny Try Underneath Understand Whole World
I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion.
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Fascinate Intersection Long Religion Science Time
What sense is there in continuing when one has seen the future?
ALAN LIGHTMAN

Continue Future See Sense

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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