Alan Lightman Quotes About Character

Quotes about: Character

• "The Diagnosis" had ten drafts of very significant changing, where I went through the whole book, wholesale and changed everything. Then the last year or so it was making small changes. I would do something and let it sit for three months... just brood about and decide I needed to slightly change something here or there. Or one character wasn't quite right. But I think everybody goes through this.

  Alan Lightman

  Book, Character, Thinking

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

• In fiction writing ideas have to be handled extremely carefully. You can't let your characters just be mouthpieces for your ideas. They have to live and breathe on their own.

  Alan Lightman

  Writing, Character, Ideas

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

• 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

  Book, Character, Plot

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

• Another strand of my writing is the importance of the idea. If you think about fiction writing as a spectrum, where at one end of the spectrum in the infrared, are the story tellers, and the people for whom creation of wonderful characters and telling a good story is the most important thing.

  Alan Lightman

  Character, Writing, Thinking

  "Alan Lightman Interview". Interview with Alex Burack, www.literarytraveler.com. May 4, 2007.

• That's the fine balance of a fiction writer...to be able to give your characters enough freedom to surprise you and yet still maintain some kind of artistic control.

  Alan Lightman

  Character, Giving, Balance

  Interview with Robert Birnbaum, www.identitytheory.com. November 16, 2000.

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