Alan Lightman Quotes

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

Sometimes you don't really know what you're going to write about. I mean, there's times where you get into a writing room and it's a complete flop. And then there's times where you get to a writing room and you're like, 'Oh, I'm just on a roll.'

a novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living - so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings around, darts, dashes, and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination.

Let's say I've directed that [writing] energy into writing my latest book but suddenly, I really want to write about an onion. I don't say to myself, "No, you have stay on the subject," because I know that the longer I stay on the subject the more boring I get. So, if my mind wants to write about an onion, it might be a deeper way to go into what I'm working on, even though it might seem irrelevant. This is how I've learned to follow my mind.

I sit and I write automatically. I don't really try to write. My subconscious mind takes over and writes the songs for me. Songs come very easily for me. When I'm inspired, it takes me 20 minutes to write a song.

I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.

It was a roller-coaster process. For a long time I had no idea what I was doing. I wasn't writing with an outline. And, rare for me, I wrote scenes out of sequence. . . . I didn't understand the play when I wrote it. It was something I'd give in to. It happens to me periodically. I give over and write whatever comes to me and I don't know what it means and then I do. It's thrilling.

It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.

Sometimes I look back and think, "How did I write that? The book is smarter than I am!" I have never written strategically, but rather, followed the dictates of my muse.

A book, at the same time, also has to do with what I call a buzz in the head. It's a certain kind of music that I start hearing. It's the music of the language, but it's also the music of the story. I have to live with that music for a while before I can put any words on the page. I think that's because I have to get my body as much as my mind accustomed to the music of writing that particular book. It really is a mysterious feeling.

No poem is worth anything unless it starts from a poetic trance, out of which you can be wakened by interruption as from a dream. In fact, it is the same thing.

When I'm writing I don't dream much; it's like the dreaming gets used in the writing.

You don’t think when you play music, you just try to play and be in it. It is the same for me when the writing is going really well. It’s the same kind of feeling. I’m just in it. It’s not the words, it’s not the sentences, I’m not aware of it. Then it’s good.

Writing is a strange synthesis between the two parts of your mind: the analytical side and the side that knows nothing at all, and you have to allow the dreaming side free rein.

I try not to get analytical in the writing process. I try to just kind of keep the flow from my brain to my hand as far as the pen is concerned and go with the moment and go with my guts.

Writing a novel is like an amusement park or a museum or a city. You go into that place and you have certain experiences and those experiences, hopefully, have some impact on you.

It's a neat experience to go from the blank page to an actor elevating it to the audience understanding it - the full life of that is why I became a writer.

Some people, it [songwriting] comes faster. Some people, it comes slower.

Your first book is the only one that matters. Perhaps a writer should write only that one. That is the one moment when you make the big leap; the opportunity to express yourself is offered that once, and you untie the knot within you then or never again.

Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too. If she doesn’t show up invited, eventually she just shows up

When I'm recording, which is synonymous with writing, I'll play things over and over again until it sounds like I've got the right guitar part. Whereas I think, as the much younger player I tended to do things much more consciously. I didn't wait for the moment where inspiration might strike. That's what I do now. I wait for it to naturally start to replay itself in my mind. As I say, I don't force it. So I like to think of myself as a receiver. I'm a telephone line to who knows where, but until I hear it through that receiver, I don't usually do it. It's got to start writing itself somehow.

The artistic impulse seems not to wish to produce finished work. It certainly deserts us half-way, after the idea is born; and if we go on, it is labor.

Writing is alone, but I don't think it's lonely. Ask any writer if they feel lonely when they're writing their book, and I think they'll say no.

Anything that propels me to create, like [my book, Straight Walk]. It kept me inspired for almost four years.

I'm not thinking much about overall themes or preoccupations or anything like that. Instead I'm just trusting that, if I'm working hard, various notions and riffs and motifs and so on are very naturally suffusing the stories and the resulting book.