Human beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition.
ALAN LIGHTMANHuman beings consider themselves satisfied only compared to some other condition.
ALAN LIGHTMAN“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 LIGHTMANIn a world of fixed future, life is an infinite corridor of rooms, one room lit at each moment, the next room dark but prepared.
ALAN LIGHTMANMy second novel, “Good Benito”, was not finished. I wished that I had spent another year with it.
ALAN LIGHTMANI love the fact publishers are still publishing unprofitable material. It’s a challenge to the powers that be. It’s saying there is a real literature in this country and we will keep publishing it.
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.
ALAN LIGHTMANEach future moves in a different direction of time. Each future is real.
ALAN LIGHTMANYou’ve made something grand, but it will be grander if it has feeling and beauty and harmony.
ALAN LIGHTMANEvery reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
ALAN LIGHTMANThe future is pattern, organization, union, intensification; the past, randomness, confusion, disintegration, dissipation.
ALAN LIGHTMANIn this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.
ALAN LIGHTMANAnd since the human mind has a degree of infinity and imagination unlikely to be matched by a machine for a very, very long time, I don’t think that we will become the machines of the machines.
ALAN LIGHTMANOh, love is very much a physical thing…. I realize that it’s very complicated, and I’m sure it can’t be traced to individual neurons and hormones, but I think it’s very much a physiological sensation that takes place in the brain.
ALAN LIGHTMANAll writers have roots they draw from – travel, work, family. My roots are in science and it is fertile ground for fiction.
ALAN LIGHTMANWriters read essays and serious thinkers and serious readers… that is a small population.
ALAN LIGHTMANIn a world without future, each parting of friends is a death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final.
ALAN LIGHTMAN