I wouldn’t overall say that “The Diagnosis” is a funny book. I would say that it has comic moments. It’s a modern tragedy.
ALAN LIGHTMANFor my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class – contemporary literature is what’s most useful.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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Is anything so pure? Or is love, by its nature, a reciprocity, like oceans and clouds, an evaporating of seawater and a replenishing of rain?
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The target of power is more interesting than its quantity.
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In fiction writing ideas have to be handled extremely carefully.
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I think it is always a long shot getting a book made into a film.
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We have become disembodied. By being always somewhere else we are nowhere.
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In this world, time has three dimensions, like space.
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Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational.
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My writings are an exploration, and I think a lot of writers would tell you this, but in writing, you’re not simply putting down things that are already known to you. You’re actually discovering in the writing process, you’re actually creating knowledge.
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The exploding star of A.D. 1054, the Crab Nebula, was sighted and documented by the Chinese, but nowhere mentioned in the West, where the Aristotelian notion of the immortality of stars still held sway.
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After a while the car becomes just another thing that he owns. Moreover, when his neighbor next door buys two cars, in an instant our man feels wretchedly poor and deprived.
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Order is the law of nature, the universal trend, the cosmic direction. If time is an arrow, that arrow points toward order.
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Children grow rapidly, forget the centuries-long embrace from their parents, which to them lasted but seconds. Children become adults, live far from their parents, live their own houses, learn ways of their own, suffer pain, grow old.
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You’ve made something grand, but it will be grander if it has feeling and beauty and harmony.
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Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself. The world repeats itself, precisely, endlessly.
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There is a cultural diversity that’s very valuable, and it’s valuable to have different ways of looking at the world.
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