Alan Lightman Quotes

There are books that I read years ago that enlivened things in me that haven't died yet.

It's interesting how songs can evolve. Sometimes I'll write a song that feels relevant in the moment, but four years later, I don't want to sing it anymore. Then something will happen in my life, and the song becomes relevant again.

Like everybody, my views on many issues have changed as I have gotten older.

I remember very well, when I was at Oxford, an old gentleman said to me, "Young man, ply your book diligently now, and acquire a stock of knowledge; for when years come upon you, you will find that poring upon books will be but an irksome task.

A book is a friend whose face is constantly changing. If you read it when you are recovering from an illness, and return to it years after, it is changed surely, with the change in yourself.

When I was fourteen years old, I was amazed at how unintelligent my father was. By the time I turned twenty-one, I was astounded how much he had learned in the last seven years.

I think readers are just looking for things that maybe they recognize or can relate to in the books.

Many books in my library are now behind and beneath me. They were good in their way once, and so were the clothes I wore when I was ten years old; but I have outgrown them. Nobody ever outgrows Scripture; the book widens and deepens with our years.

I think we're on a journey....It was very easy to write about my past in my book, but writing about the present is all a new chapter. I hope that people find this journey fascinating, informative and educational.

Once you finish a book, it doesn't belong to you anymore. You're giving it to other people. If something in what a writer writes can excite the imagination and the feelings of the reader, then that reader carries it around forever. Nothing is more vivid than good fiction.

In my early years I read very hard. It is a sad reflection, but a true one, that I knew almost as much at eighteen as I do now.

How long does it take to write a good book? All of the years that you've lived.

Really, the greatest compliments about a book [One Thousand Gifts] are never about the book, or the author of the book, but about the reader and God and how the pages helped them connect at a deeper level.

I started understanding William Blake and George Orwell more and more. It's amazing how we go to school when we're so young, read all of these books, just trying to memorize them. When you start to live, you don't have to memorize anything.

When you trust your readers, you're hoping they will see what you see. Not every book is for every person.

I think it was simply word of mouth that made it a New York Times bestseller for more than 60 weeks, over a year. People being moved and changed and transformed by the book [ One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are] and wanting to share that with hurting people all around them.

[Getting older is] experience but it's also changing your mindset.

The gift of creative reading, like all natural gifts, must be nourished or it will atrophy. And you nourish it, in much the same way you nourish the gift of writing - you read, think, talk, look, listen, hate, fear, love, weep - and bring all of your life like a sieve to what you read. That which is not worthy of your gift will quickly pass through, but the gold remains.

I was young - I was 20 years old. Now I have the gift of perspective and I feel pretty good about it.

As you get older, you get tired of doing the same things over and over again, so you think Christmas has changed. It hasn't. It's you who has changed.

I learned to read at the age of five, in Brother Justiniano's class at the De la Salle Academy in Cochabamba, Bolivia. It is the most important thing that has ever happened to me. Almost seventy years later I remember clearly how the magic of translating the words in books into images enriched my life, breaking the barriers of time and space.

It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself.

A principal aim of education is to give students a taste for literature, for the books of life and power, and to accomplish this, it is necessary that their minds be held aloof from the babblement and discussions of the hour, that they may accustom themselves to take interest in the words and deeds of the greatest men, and so make themselves able and worthy to shape a larger and nobler future; but if their hours of leisure are spent over journals and reviews, they will, in later years, become the helpless victims of the newspaper habit.

It's too bad failures don't give seminars. Wouldn't that be valuable? If you meet a guy who has messed up his life for forty years, you've just got to say, 'John, if I bring my journal and promise to take good notes, would you spend a day with me?'

Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings - as some savage tribes determine the power of muskets by their recoil; that being considered best which fairly prostrates the purchaser.