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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: 75
Born: 1948
Born: November 28
Astrophysicist
Novelist
Physicist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Memphis
Tennessee
Alan Paige Lightman
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More quotes by Alan Lightman
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
As human beings, don't we need questions without answers as well as questions with answers, questions that we might someday answer and questions that we can never answer?
Alan Lightman
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
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
Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
Alan Lightman
A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life. That's a sign of a good novel. Not only will two different readers get something different but so will a single reader at different points in his life.
Alan Lightman
Everyone shares the same fate.
Alan Lightman
Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free. Over time, some have determined that the only way to live is to die. In death, a man or a woman is free of the weight of the past [and the future].
Alan Lightman
I oppose any belief that contradicts experimental evidence as determined by the methods of science. All beliefs not in such contradiction may be considered as faith. Whether faith in a particular belief is beneficial or not is another matter.
Alan Lightman
Although technology is proceeding at a dizzying pace, I believe that the human mind will always have control of itself. 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.
Alan Lightman
The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present.
Alan Lightman
Franz Kafka is an idea person. His books begin and end in ideas. Ideas have always been important to me in my writing. To the point that I have to be careful that they don't take over.
Alan Lightman
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. Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
Alan Lightman
It's the Platonic philosophy in The Republic that philosophers should lead the country.
Alan Lightman
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
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
Who would fare better in this world of fitful time? Those who have seen the future and live only one life? Or those who have not seen the future and wait to live life? Or those who deny the future and live two lives?
Alan Lightman
The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles.
Alan Lightman
We live in a highly polarized society. We need to try to understand each other in respectful ways. To that end, I believe that we should make room for both spiritual atheists and thinking believers.
Alan Lightman
When I used to play golf. It's a terrible miserable game. It's incredibly frustrating. In 18 holes you make 150 horrible shots off in the woods, in the water...You make one good shot and it brings you back the next time. With writing a long book there has to be at least one bit that has some magic in it that you can go back to.
Alan Lightman
