A Quote by Alan Lightman
I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.
Related Quotes
Constrained optimization is the art of compromise between conflicting objectives. This is what design is all about. To find fault with biological design - as Stephen Jay Gould regularly does - because it misses some idealized optimum is therefore gratuitous. Not knowing the objectives of the designer, Gould is in no position to say whether the designer has proposed a faulty compromise among those objectives.
I've been influenced by poets as diverse as Dylan Thomas, Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Allan Poe.
I read a fair amount [of science fiction], and you know it was certainly inspirational. I have to pinch myself to think that we might be able to make some of [what I've read in science fiction books] come true.
Creative non-fiction is such a liberating genre because it allows the non-fiction writer, whether he or she be journalist or essayist, to use all of the techniques of the fiction writer and all of the ideas, creative approaches, that fiction writers get a chance to use, but they have to use it in a true story.
I feel that I'm an essayist and that my best work gets done in that form. I wanted to do a book where the essays could exist on their own terms. A book that was neither a book of essays that were shoehorned into a memoir, nor [one where] the essays had been published elsewhere first, [because] then they would kind of bear the marks of those publications.
I've read science fiction my whole life. I never really dreamed that I'd be a published science fiction writer myself, but a short story I started years ago sort of demanded to be turned into a novel.
I'm fond of science fiction. But not all science fiction. I like science fiction where there's a scientific lesson, for example - when the science fiction book changes one thing but leaves the rest of science intact and explores the consequences of that. That's actually very valuable.
When you go back and look at what people say about my essays, they're always going, 'What is this?' Because they're not exactly like other people's essays... The approach is not at all the recognized approach of a non-fiction writer. It's not linear. It isn't pyramidally based on fact.
I have always been intensely uncomfortable with the idea of a science fiction writer as prophet. Not that there haven't been science fiction writers who think of themselves as having some sort of prophetic role, but when I think of that, I always think of H.G. Wells - he would think of what was going to happen, and he would imagine how it would happen, and then he would create a fiction to illustrate the idea that he'd had. And no part of my process has ever resembled that at all.
When I think about myself as a writer, for sure I am a science fiction writer. The tools of extrapolation, the tools of anticipating the future - those are science fictional questions.
I like to think I've grown as a writer and taken some risks, but I still consider myself to be a literary writer.
I think every writer of detective fiction writing today has been influenced by Mr. Parker. I'm of a generation that followed Robert Parker, and it was impossible to read the genre and not be influenced by him.
Louise Gluck, C.K. Williams, Thomas Lux. A lot of the poets that I like are the ones that influenced me as a writer.
Arnošt Lustig is one of the leading contemporary Czech fiction writers, and certainly the most important Jewish writer of Bohemia to have survived the Holocaust.
For books, I don't read much fiction, but like travel essays and good pop-science.
I grew up poor in crappy situations various crappy situations. What kept me sane was reading and music. I had so many different literary tastes growing up, be it fiction like Stephen King or Piers Anthony or non-fiction like reading Hunter S. Thompson essays or reading the Beats. I was a huge fan of the Beat movement.
Related Authors
Albert Einstein Quotes
German
Physicist
Brian Greene Quotes
American
Physicist
Freeman Dyson Quotes
American
Physicist
Gregory Benford Quotes
American
Physicist
J. Robert Oppenheimer Quotes
American
Physicist
James Clerk Maxwell Quotes
Scottish
Physicist
Lawrence M. Krauss Quotes
American
Physicist
Leonard Mlodinow Quotes
American
Physicist
Lisa Randall Quotes
American
Physicist
Michio Kaku Quotes
American
Physicist
Murray Gell-Mann Quotes
American
Physicist
Niels Bohr Quotes
Danish
Physicist
Richard P. Feynman Quotes
American
Physicist
Roger Penrose Quotes
English
Physicist
Stephen Hawking Quotes
English
Physicist
Werner Heisenberg Quotes
German
Physicist