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The urge to discover, to invent, to know the unknown, seems so deeply human that we cannot imagine our history without it.

Alan Lightman

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Alan Lightman
Age: 75
Born: 1948
Born: November 28
Astrophysicist
Novelist
Physicist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Memphis
Tennessee
Alan Paige Lightman
Humans
Deeply
Without
Discover
Discovery
Imagine
History
Urge
Cannot
Invent
Seems
Urges
Human
Unknown

More quotes by Alan Lightman

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If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to surprise you.
Alan Lightman
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In fiction writing ideas have to be handled extremely carefully. You can't let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They have to live and breathe on their own.
Alan Lightman
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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 Lightman
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Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain. Sexual arousal is no more than a flow of chemicals to certain nerve endings. Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum. In short, the body is a machine, subject to the same laws of electricity and mechanics as an electron or clock.
Alan Lightman
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In a world without future, each parting of friends is a death. In a world without future, each loneliness is final. In a world without future, each laugh is the last laugh. In a world without future, beyond the present lies nothingness, and people cling to the present as if hanging from a cliff.
Alan Lightman
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Oh, 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 Lightman
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I value my correspondence with writers...I was in New York and had lunch with Oliver Sachs and compared notes with him - he is someone I really like. I love staying in written correspondence with some writers. That's enough for me.
Alan Lightman
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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.
Alan Lightman
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Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
Alan Lightman
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No one ever expects poetry to sell...
Alan Lightman
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For it is only habit and memory that dulls the physical passion. Without memory, each night is the first night, each morning is the first morning, each kiss and touch are the first.
Alan Lightman
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I have for a long time loved fabulist, imaginative fiction, such as the writing of Italo Calvino, Jose Saramago, Michael Bulgakov, and Salman Rushdie. 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.
Alan Lightman
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I think all tragedies are best told with some humor. You have to relieve the darkness to let the reader get through it. Also, that life has happiness and sadness mixed together. If you told a story that was all darkness, it wouldn't be real.
Alan Lightman
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I think it is always a long shot getting a book made into a film. Making that book into a film is going to be quite a challenge.
Alan Lightman
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I should have written books instead of reading them.
Alan Lightman
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Writers read essays and serious thinkers and serious readers... that is a small population.
Alan Lightman
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Faith is the ability to honor stillness at some moments, and at others to ride the passion and exuberance.
Alan Lightman
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As a scientist, I don't believe science will ever discover whether God exists. Nor do I believe religion will ever prove it.
Alan Lightman
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I re-read a lot of books that I like a lot. There are some books that I try to reread every couple of years. A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life.
Alan Lightman
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Except for a God who sits down after the universe begins, all other gods conflict with the assumptions of science.
Alan Lightman