I remember one occasion when I tried to add a little seasoning to a review, but I wasn't allowed to. The paper was by Dorothy Maharam, and it was a perfectly sound contribution to abstract measure theory. The domains of the underlying measures were not sets but elements of more general Boolean algebras, and their range consisted not of positive numbers but of certain abstract equivalence classes. My proposed first sentence was: "The author discusses valueless measures in pointless spaces."

The only way to learn mathematics is to do mathematics.

...the source of all great mathematics is the special case, the concrete example. It is frequent in mathematics that every instance of a concept of seemingly generality is, in essence, the same as a small and concrete special case.

The beginner should not be discouraged if he finds he does not have the prerequisites for reading the prerequisites.

Mathematics - this may surprise or shock some - is never deductive in creation.

Mathematics is not a deductive science - that's a cliché... What you do is trial and error, experimentation, guesswork.

It saddens me that educated people don't even know that my subject exists.