They would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case.
ALAN LIGHTMANAnother strand of my writing is the importance of the idea.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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I love staying in written correspondence with some writers. That’s enough for me.
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Authenticity and sincerity were the most important unifying principles of all these apparently different essays.
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A man who has owned nothing but a bicycle all of his life feels suddenly wealthy the moment he buys an automobile…But this happy sensation wears off.
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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 re-read a lot of books that I like a lot. There are some books that I try to reread every couple of years. A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life.
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I think all tragedies are best told with some humor. You have to relieve the darkness to let the reader get through it. Also, that life has happiness and sadness mixed together.
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Will never fail to show his love, will never become jealous, will never fall in love with someone else, will never lose the passion of this instant of time.
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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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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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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.
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Except for a God who sits down after the universe begins, all other gods conflict with the assumptions of science.
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In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.” “They do not keep clocks in their houses. Instead, they listen to their heartbeats. They feel the rhythms of their moods and desires.”
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Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition.
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The urge to discover, to invent, to know the unknown, seems so deeply human that we cannot imagine our history without it.
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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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN