“The Diagnosis” had ten drafts of very significant changing, where I went through the whole book, wholesale and changed everything. Then the last year or so it was making small changes.
ALAN LIGHTMANSuppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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My second novel, “Good Benito”, was not finished. I wished that I had spent another year with it.
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A person who cannot imagine the future is a person who cannot contemplate the results of his actions. Some are thus paralyzed into inaction.
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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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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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Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
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I value my correspondence with writers…
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Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea.
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Writers are a loosely knit community – community is an overstated word. Writers don’t see each other very much.
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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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The tragedy of this world is that no one is happy, whether stuck in a time of pain or joy.
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For me, consciousness is the most interesting unsolved problem of science, and, in fact, we may never know what it is about a particular arrangement of neurons that gives rise to consciousness. Our consciousness.
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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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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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Just as an object may move in three perpendicular directions, corresponding to horizontal, vertical, and longitudinal, so an object may participate in three perpendicular futures.
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There are important differences which should be preserved, and in trying to do away with those differences we would lose something the same way as if we tried to make all religions one religion or all races one race.
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One cannot walk down an avenue, converse with a friend, enter a building, browse beneath the sandstone arches of an old arcade without meeting an instrument of time.
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An unusual counterpoint between personal history and the history of a young nation. Haunting, powerful, and beautifully written.
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I consider myself a spiritual atheist.
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That has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact has become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent determination,
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With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great grandparents, great-aunts…and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice.
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And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence.
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I am spellbound by the plays of Shakespeare. And I am spellbound by the second law of thermodynamics.
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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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While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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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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There is a place where time stands still.
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