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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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Alan Lightman
Age: 75
Born: 1948
Born: November 28
Astrophysicist
Novelist
Physicist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Memphis
Tennessee
Alan Paige Lightman
Comic
Tragedy
Wouldn
Modern
Funny
Moments
Book
Diagnosis
Would
Overall
More quotes by 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
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
A writer is someone who has a one-man tent in the desert and occasionally he sees the footprint of an other writer - in the form of a review or something.
Alan Lightman
The world is moving faster and faster, but where are we going?
Alan Lightman
I think what gets you through a small writing project, is just one burst of inspiration. A book, especially a longer book, it's a different kind of force that pushes you through it. It's a vision of the whole thing.
Alan Lightman
Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past.
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
Despite our strongly felt kinship and oneness with nature, all the evidence suggests that nature doesn't care one whit about us. Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions happen without the slightest consideration for human inhabitants.
Alan Lightman
Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.
Alan Lightman
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
I go to live in Maine for the summer. Without computer, and without the telephone service we are mercifully without the faxes and e-mails. So it's really about two and a half months that I'll feel like I can recover some silence in my life...which is so hard to find.
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
A life is a moment in season. A life is one snowfall. A life is one autumn day. A life is the delicate, rapid edge of a closing door's shadow. A life is a brief movement of arms and of legs.
Alan Lightman
-But rational thoughts lead only to rational thoughts, whereas irrational thoughts lead to new experiences.
Alan Lightman
Writers are a loosely knit community - community is an overstated word. Writers don't see each other very much.
Alan Lightman
In a world without future, each moment is the end of the world.
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
People are content to live in contradictory worlds, so long as they know the reason for each.
Alan Lightman
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
That has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact has become a digitized disembodied nothingness. With magnificent determination, our species has advanced from Stone Age to Industrial Revolution to Digital Emptiness. We've become weightless, in the bad sense of the word.
Alan Lightman
