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My second novel, Good Benito, was not finished. I wished that I had spent another year with 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
Spent
Second
Novel
Year
Another
Years
Good
Wished
Finished

More quotes by Alan Lightman

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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
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Writers read essays and serious thinkers and serious readers... that is a small population.
Alan Lightman
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While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
Alan Lightman
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A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation. For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable. While people can be doubted, time cannot be doubted. While people brood, time skips ahead without looking back.
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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The target of power is more interesting than its quantity.
Alan Lightman
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I love the fact publishers are still publishing unprofitable material. It's a challenge to the powers that be. It's saying there is a real literature in this country and we will keep publishing it.
Alan Lightman
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For my students who are trying to learn the craft of writing in a writing class - contemporary literature is what's most useful.
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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It's exciting having a student who is not used to expressing their emotional side and bringing that out in them and see that developing and helping to nurture that. That's an exciting thing. In a class of fifteen there are usually two very good writers, equal to good student writers anywhere in the country. Those two make the class wonderful.
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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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
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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
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There is a place where time stands still ...illuminated by only the most feeble red light, for light is diminished to almost nothing at the center of time, its vibrations slowed to echoes in vast canyons, its intensity reduced to the faint glow of fireflies.
Alan Lightman
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You've made something grand, but it will be grander if it has feeling and beauty and harmony.
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 have always loved magic realism as a form of writing. I have also been fascinated for a long time with the intersection of science and religion.
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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The tragedy of this world is that everyone is alone. For a life in the past cannot be shared with the present.
Alan Lightman
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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