Able Quote by Alan Lightman

“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.”

Alan Lightman

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Able Book Books Character Enough Freedom Ifs Life Plot Surprise

More by Alan Lightman

“In a world of fixed future, there can be no right or wrong. Right and wrong demand freedom of choice, but if each action…

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

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"The Diagnosis" is by far my most ambitious book. I such great hopes for it... there was so much I wanted to do with…

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As long as God does not intervene in the contemporary universe in such a way as to violate physical laws, science has no way…

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

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Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.

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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…

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

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For me, spirituality includes the belief in things larger than ourselves, an appreciation of nature and beauty, a sensitivity to the world, a feeling…

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

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Imagine a world in which there is no time. Only images.

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Explore all 174 Alan Lightman quotes

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I wanted to remember in order to be able to return.

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