I don't know all the reasons for these achievements, but I know that I love what I do and I have never wanted to rest on my laurels.

When they called me with the Nobel call from Secretary General of the Swedish Academy it was twenty minutes to six and he said well that was well hope I'm not disturbing you but I am the Secretary General of the Swedish Academy. Of course you can imagine I was frozen in time when he said that but then he made a very famous statement, something to the effect that this is the last 20 minutes of peace of your life.

There is a danger one has to really be knowing much more because you can't be too narrow on science.

I built on the efforts of a previous scientist, others will build on the work I'm doing and if I look at the whole scope from chemistry to biology to physics, it's just the list is too long to mention just one and it's not fair to the others.

Everybody thinks some times that science is done as a master plan and that somebody like me came from Mars and figured out everything and so on, but that's really not the way it worked.

Perhaps the most valuable thing he taught me (his father) was that there is no contradiction between devotion to work and enjoyment of life and people

Syria is the proud heir of an ancient civilization that has a unique spectrum of minorities that encompasses Muslims and Christians of various denominations. There are at least ten such ethnic and religious groups.