Alan Lightman Quotes

Authenticity and sincerity were the most important unifying principles of all these apparently different essays.

You can’t let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They have to live and breathe on their own.

The book is finished by the reader. A good novel should invite the reader in and let the reader participate in the creative experience and bring their own life experiences to it, interpret with their own individual life experiences.

In a world without future, each parting of friends is a death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final.

“Then there are those who think their bodies don’t exist. They live by mechanical time. They rise at seven o’clock in the morning. They eat their lunch at noon and their supper at six. They arrive at their appointments on time, precisely by the clock.

Unconditional love. That’s what he wants to give her and what he wants from her. People should give without wanting anything in return.

Order is the law of nature, the universal trend, the cosmic direction. If time is an arrow, that arrow points toward order.

Writers read essays and serious thinkers and serious readers… that is a small population.

It is true that the arts at MIT don’t have the same amount of funding or same status as the sciences or engineering.

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.