In fiction writing ideas have to be handled extremely carefully. You can't let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They… — Alan Lightman Copy Share Image
If you over-plot your book you strangle your characters. Your characters have to have enough freedom and life to be able to… — Alan Lightman Copy Share Image
"The Diagnosis" had ten drafts of very significant changing, where I went through the whole book, wholesale and changed everything. Then the… — Alan Lightman Copy Share Image
Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea. If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at… — Alan Lightman Copy Share Image
That's the fine balance of a fiction writer...to be able to give your characters enough freedom to surprise you and yet still… — Alan Lightman Copy Share Image
“In a world of fixed future, there can be no right or wrong. Right and wrong demand freedom of choice, but if each action… — Alan Lightman Copy Share Image
“I've decided that has been the great achievement of our age: to so thoroughly flood the planet with megabits that every image and fact… — Alan Lightman Copy Share Image
Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way. — Alan Lightman Copy Share Image
"The Diagnosis" is by far my most ambitious book. I such great hopes for it... there was so much I wanted to do with… — Alan Lightman Copy Share Image
As long as God does not intervene in the contemporary universe in such a way as to violate physical laws, science has no way… — Alan Lightman Copy Share Image
Except for a God who sits down after the universe begins, all other gods conflict with the assumptions of science. — Alan Lightman Copy Share Image
A writer is someone who has a one-man tent in the desert and occasionally he sees the footprint of an other writer - in… — Alan Lightman Copy Share Image
Time is a rigid, bonelike structure, extending infinitely ahead and behind, fossilizing the future as well as the past. — Alan Lightman Copy Share Image
For me, spirituality includes the belief in things larger than ourselves, an appreciation of nature and beauty, a sensitivity to the world, a feeling… — Alan Lightman Copy Share Image
Writers are a loosely knit community - community is an overstated word. Writers don't see each other very much. — Alan Lightman Copy Share Image
