Latest Alan Lightman Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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

  Book, Thinking, Long

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

• 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

  Writing, Class, Trying

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

• 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

  Writing, Character, Ideas

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

• I'm humbled and enormously grateful to be connected to [Franz] Kafka in a any way. He is one of the writers I admire. I think he has been a big influence on me. I appreciate the idea of the individual person battling the society - which is true in all his books.

  Alan Lightman

  Book, Grateful, Thinking

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

• 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

  Book, Writing, Ideas

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

• 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

  Country, Emotional, Class

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

• I think people all over the institution recognize that different ways of understanding are valuable. Artists may think in a different way than biologists or chemists, but you can learn something from that. It is true that the arts at MIT don't have the same amount of funding or same status as the sciences or engineering.

  Alan Lightman

  Art, Thinking, Engineering

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

• 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

  Men, Desert, Tents

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

• I value my correspondence with writers...I was in New York and had lunch with Oliver Sachs and compared notes with him - he is someone I really like. I love staying in written correspondence with some writers. That's enough for me.

  Alan Lightman

  New York, Lunch, Enough

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

• Writers are a loosely knit community - community is an overstated word. Writers don't see each other very much.

  Alan Lightman

  Community

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

• I have a number of vague ideas where I just have the core or kernel of the idea. I feel like I need some time for my mind to fill up again. I feel empty. Right now.

  Alan Lightman

  Ideas, Numbers, Mind

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

• One metaphor for how we are living is that you see so may people with cell phones. In restaurants, walking, they have cell phones clamped to their to heads. When they are on their cell phones they are not where their bodies are...they are somewhere else in hyperspace. They are not grounded. We have become disembodied. By being always somewhere else we are nowhere.

  Alan Lightman

  Phones, Cells, Somewhere Else

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

• We've lost our way, we have lost our centeredness. We don't have the time, literally, to think during the day. To listen to ourselves think. To think about where we are going, who we are, what's important. I would bet most people don't have thirty minutes in a day where they can just sit down and think. Or maybe they don't have to be sitting, they can be walking.

  Alan Lightman

  Thinking, People, Important

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

• 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

  Moving, Thinking, World

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

• I re-read a lot of books that I like a lot. There are some books that I try to reread every couple of years. A good book changes for you every few years because you are in a different place in your own life.

  Alan Lightman

  Couple, Book, Years

  Source: www.identitytheory.com

• Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.

  Alan Lightman

  Book, Different, Way

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

• I'm still happy with the way Einstein's Dreams came out. That book came out of a single inspiration. I really felt like I was not creating the words, that I was hearing the words. That someone else was speaking the words to me and I was just writing them down. It was a very strange experience. That can happen with a short book. I don't think it could happen with a long book.

  Alan Lightman

  Dream, Book, Inspiration

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

• My second novel, "Good Benito", was not finished. I wished that I had spent another year with it.

  Alan Lightman

  Years, Another Year, Novel

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

• You say, "Something important really happened here. I really had hold of something I was visited by the muse." And that's enough to make you continue the months and years to finish the whole book.

  Alan Lightman

  Book, Years, Important

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

• 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

  Book, Writing, Golf

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

• 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

  Book, Inspiration, Writing

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

• "The Diagnosis" had ten drafts of very significant changing, where I went through the whole book, wholesale and changed everything. Then the last year or so it was making small changes. I would do something and let it sit for three months... just brood about and decide I needed to slightly change something here or there. Or one character wasn't quite right. But I think everybody goes through this.

  Alan Lightman

  Book, Character, Thinking

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

• That's the fine balance of a fiction writer...to be able to give your characters enough freedom to surprise you and yet still maintain some kind of artistic control.

  Alan Lightman

  Character, Giving, Balance

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

• "The Diagnosis" is by far my most ambitious book. I such great hopes for it... there was so much I wanted to do with the book. I was extremely insecure about it for several years. Just didn't know whether I would finish the book much less for it to come close to what I intended. I think that for any novel you never know exactly how the book is going to turn out...

  Alan Lightman

  Book, Insecure, Thinking

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

• 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

  Book, Tragedy, Diagnosis

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.