Alan Lightman Quotes

I try to avoid describing one interpretation of my books. Of course I have an opinion. I have things I want to say, but I don't ever want to limit anybody, to have them say, 'Oh, he said this, so that's what it's about.' I'm happy people bring their own stuff to it.

The glory of a good tale is that it is limitless and fluid; a good tale belongs to each reader in its own particular way.

Readers themselves, I think, contribute to a book. They add their own imaginations, and it is as though the writer only gave them something to work on, and they did the rest.

My job is to form the people, the story, the sentences. Every reader will bring their own life and their own history to the story and shape it accordingly. I guess you can say it's like I am sending them a letter.

The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.

If books could have more, give more, be more, show more, they would still need readers who bring to them sound and smell and light and all the rest that can’t be in books. The book needs you.

I don't expect everyone to get something deep out of it. Some people can just listen to the music, or get their aggressions out, but I think with any great painting or movie, album or whatever it is, it's better if people can take what they need from it. That they're not forced to get some particular message.

Readers re-create any story to suit their own needs. They re-clothe the story in their own shirts. Put simply: just as we write the story we need to write, they read the story they need to read.

The poet can only write the poems; it takes the reader to complete the meaning.

The better the book the more room for the reader.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.

The writer's job, after all, is not to dictate meaning, but to give the reader enough pieces to create his or her own satisfying meaning. The story is truly finished—and meaning is made—not when the author adds the last period, but when the reader enters the story and fills that little ambiguous space, completing the circuit, letting the power flow through.

A reader is entitled to believe what he or she believes is consonant with the facts of the book. It is not unusual that readers take away something that is spiritually at variance from what I myself experienced. That's not to say readers make up the book they want. We all have to agree on the facts. But readers bring their histories and all sets of longings. A book will pluck the strings of those longings differently among different readers.

A book is completed only when it is finished by a reader.

I hope readers will do what I do when I read a novel I like: talk in ways that will illuminate their own lives.

You know, I just don't believe that art is supposed to make sense. I really don't think it's supposed to be analyzed to death. It's left to the listener or looker to get what they can get from it.

I want my readers to find their own way.

The way a book is read, which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it.

I think that reading is always active. As a writer, you can only go so far; the reader meets you halfway, bringing his or her own experience to bear on everything you've written. What I mean is that it is not only the writer's memory that filters experience, but the reader's as well.

I think once you write fiction, you put it out, and it can be interpreted in a variety of ways, some of which are going to be shocking to the writer.

Books don't exist unless you read them. And it's a two way process - you write the book as you read it and you fill in the gaps. You discover it and you put the marks together and without you doing it they're just marks.

We buy a copy of 'Gravity's Rainbow,' say, and we carry our copy home. We open it; we fall into it. And it is here that the word 'copy' fails. Because what I experience when I read 'Gravity's Rainbow,' or 'Beloved,' or 'The Moviegoer,' is not at all a 'copy' of what you experience when you read the same novel.

You finish a film not in the editing, but in the conversations that audiences have with themselves - and in that sense, every viewer is making a slightly different film. And that's wonderful.

In a graphic novel, you have to allow for a certain amount of freedom on the reader's part to experience it how they choose.

Meaning lies as much in the mind of the reader as in the Haiku.