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.
ALAN LIGHTMANThe tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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I 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.
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We often do not see what we do not expect to see.
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I have always loved magic realism as a form of writing.
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Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?
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Science is an intellectual journey, and to me, it’s not the destination.
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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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Sexual arousal is no more than a flow of chemicals to certain nerve endings.
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As long as God does not intervene in the contemporary universe in such a way as to violate physical laws, science has no way of knowing whether God exists or not.
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I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion.
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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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That someone else was speaking the words to me and I was just writing them down. It was a very strange experience. That can happen with a short book. I don’t think it could happen with a long book.
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Illuminated by only the most feeble red light, for light is diminished to almost nothing at the center of time, its vibrations slowed to echoes in vast canyons, its intensity reduced to the faint glow of fireflies.
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Don’t you feel something magical when you’re in love?… I do, I certainly do … but I think that feeling of magic is a hardwired psychological response. It’s a chemical thing in the brain.
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So it’s really about two and a half months that I’ll feel like I can recover some silence in my life…which is so hard to find.
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In fiction writing ideas have to be handled extremely carefully.
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It’s the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country.
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“The Diagnosis” is by far my most ambitious book. I such great hopes for it… there was so much I wanted to do with the book. I was extremely insecure about it for several years.
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Children curse their parents for their wrinkled skin and hoarse voices. Those now old children also want to stop time, but at another time. They want to freeze their own children at the center of time.
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I also like the magic realist writers, such as Borges and Marquez, and feel that interesting truths can be learned about our world by exploring highly distorted worlds.
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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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I have no opposition at all to technology. I think technology is a wonderful thing that has to be used thoughtfully, and we can’t just assume that every bit of new technology improvesthe quality of life; it’s really in how the technology is used.
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No one knows the nature of God, or even if God exists. In a sense, all of our religions are literary works of the imagination.
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The relationship between science and the humanities is two-way. Science changes our view of the world and our place in it. In the other direction, the humanities provide the store of ideas and images and language available to us in understanding the world.
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Making that book into a film is going to be quite a challenge.
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The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
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One day I’m going to write a book about osprey. It has really gotten deep into my bloodstream. So when you ask what else I do, I feel like this is part of what I do….is to watch these birds.
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