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It's not necessarily a large number of people that affect the culture. You don't count the number of influential voices, you weigh them. A hundred people can affect the culture.

Alan Lightman

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Alan Lightman
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: November 28
Astrophysicist
Novelist
Physicist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Memphis
Tennessee
Alan Paige Lightman
Numbers
Influential
Voice
Affect
Culture
Voices
People
Count
Necessarily
Large
Number
Hundred
Weigh

More quotes by Alan Lightman

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Writers are a loosely knit community - community is an overstated word. Writers don't see each other very much.
Alan Lightman
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I think Joe Leiberman has been one of the leaders of the country... people have such a broad respect for him as a moral force.
Alan Lightman
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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.
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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In a world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely.
Alan Lightman
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The target of power is more interesting than its quantity.
Alan Lightman
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People are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.
Alan Lightman
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I should have written books instead of reading them.
Alan Lightman
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The world is moving faster and faster, but where are we going?I think one of the reasons why things are getting blurry is because there is not much meaning.
Alan Lightman
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The Book of Telling tells of a woman's journey to uncover the secret life of her father and to find herself in the process, an unusual counterpoint between personal history and the history of a young nation. Haunting, powerful, and beautifully written.
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've taken a philosophical position on e-mail. Although I think it's a wonderful communication technology, and it has a lot of good uses, it is abused quite a lot.
Alan Lightman
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Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
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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It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.
Alan Lightman
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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. The belief or disbelief in such a Being is therefore a matter of faith.
Alan Lightman
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I consider myself a spiritual atheist. I certainly believe there are forces bigger than ourselves, and that we should be searching, individually, for meaning in our lives. But I don't believe there's a supreme being, an intelligence that created everything.
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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Novels aren't pedagogical instruments, or instructions in law or physics or any other discipline. A novel has to be an emotional experience, a trip of the imagination, and because science has raised so many issues that concern and affect humans, it's a good starting place for me.
Alan Lightman
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I would think that you are more fluent with the rational. It has its appeal. But the irrational permits a greater exercise of ... shall we say, power.
Alan Lightman