Alan Lightman Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

As I understand it, a universe is a ... well, a totality. A universe is everything that is, as far as the inside of the thing.

So many little lives, amounting to nothing. I ask you: What is infinity multiplied by zero? It is hardly worth our discussion.

Except for a God who sits down after the universe begins, all other gods conflict with the assumptions of science.

Where are the one billion people who lived and breathed in the year 1800, only two short centuries ago?

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.

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.

In a world without future, each moment is the end of the world.

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.

I have too many friends who tell me that they spend the first hour of every morning going through their e-mail messages. I'd like to use my time more carefully.

The target of power is more interesting than its quantity.

No one ever expects poetry to sell...

The time-deaf are unable to speak what they know. For speech needs a sequence of words, spoken in time.

Scientists will forever have to live with the fact that their product is, in the end, impersonal.

We often do not see what we do not expect to see.

Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past.

Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened. But who could know? Who could know that the past is not as solid as this instant.

A world with one month is a world of equality.

In a world in which time is a circle, every handshake, every kiss, every birth, every word, will be repeated precisely.

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.

I should have written books instead of reading them.

The catchers delight in the moment so frozen but soon discover that the nightingale expires, its clear flutelike song diminishes to silence, the trapped moment grows withered and without life.

Events, once happened, lose reality, alter with a glance, a storm, a night. In time, the past never happened. But who could know? Who could know that the past is not as solid as this instant…