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 LIGHTMANOur species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We’ve become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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I think it is always a long shot getting a book made into a film.
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And if we can’t unplug from that machine, eventually we’re going to become mindless.
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I’m still happy with the way Einstein’s Dreams came out. That book came out of a single inspiration. I really felt like I was not creating the words, that I was hearing the words.
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Just didn’t know whether I would finish the book much less for it to come close to what I intended. I think that for any novel you never know exactly how the book is going to turn out…
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I have a family and you know very well the time that that takes. That’s good time. I have a couple hobbies. I’m a runner and play tennis. In the summer my family and I uproot ourselves and go live in Maine for the summer.
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The future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.
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It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning.
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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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With a background in science I am extremely interested in the meeting ground of science, theology, and philosophy, especially the ethical questions at the border of science and theology.
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I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie.
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Sons never escape from the shadows of their fathers. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own…Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free.
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I still will sit down at the piano and play when I am wrestling with something emotionally or just want to move into the musical world.
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I believe that we need to slow down.
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All writers have roots they draw from – travel, work, family. My roots are in science and it is fertile ground for fiction.
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The belief or disbelief in such a Being is therefore a matter of faith.
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I oppose any belief that contradicts experimental evidence as determined by the methods of science.
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Writers read essays and serious thinkers and serious readers… that is a small population.
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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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Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea.
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We don’t have the time, literally, to think during the day. To listen to ourselves think. To think about where we are going, who we are, what’s important.
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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 restaurants, walking, they have cell phones clamped to their to heads.
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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.
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When they are on their cell phones they are not where their bodies are…they are somewhere else in hyperspace. They are not grounded.
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In the coffee houses, in the government buildings, in boats of Lake Geneva, people look at their watches and take refuge in time.
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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.
ALAN LIGHTMAN