I spend a lot of time just listening to the ospreys. I watch them go through their life cycle. They spend the winter in South America.
ALAN LIGHTMANIt is true that the arts at MIT don’t have the same amount of funding or same status as the sciences or engineering.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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.
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You say, “Something important really happened here. I really had hold of something I was visited by the muse.” And that’s enough to make you continue the months and years to finish the whole book.
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I’ve taken a philosophical position on e-mail. Although I think it’s a wonderful communication technology, and it has a lot of good uses, it is abused quite a lot.
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I certainly believe there are forces bigger than ourselves, and that we should be searching, individually, for meaning in our lives. But I don’t believe there’s a supreme being, an intelligence that created everything.
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Not only will two different readers get something different but so will a single reader at different points in his life.
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Everyone shares the same fate.
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People are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.
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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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Like the air we breathe or like the passage of time, is central to our existence as intelligent beings.
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We have become disembodied. By being always somewhere else we are nowhere.
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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.
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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.
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Body time flows at its own variable rate, oblivious to the most precise hydrogen master clocks in the laboratory. In fact, the human body contains its own exquisite time-pieces, all with their separate rhythms.
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You can’t let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They have to live and breathe on their own.
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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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN