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.
ALAN LIGHTMANThe time-deaf are unable to speak what they know. For speech needs a sequence of words, spoken in time.
More Alan Lightman Quotes
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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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I think what gets you through a small writing project, is just one burst of inspiration.
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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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Originality is also very important to a writer. And all of the writers I’ve mentioned, of course, are original, but it’s important to me that every book that I do be really a completely fresh and new look at the world.
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Authenticity and sincerity were the most important unifying principles of all these apparently different essays.
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If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.
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Each person knows that somewhere is recorded the moment she was born, the moment she took her first step, the moment of her first passion, the moment she said goodbye to her parents.
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In fiction writing, I would say there are several different strands that have been woven through my own writing, and each influenced by a different group of writers.
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I love staying in written correspondence with some writers. That’s enough for me.
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I reached for some principle that had been subconscious in me and lifted it into consciousness.
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And 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.
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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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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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We’ve lost our way, we have lost our centeredness.
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Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. … It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity.
ALAN LIGHTMAN