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

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.

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.

I came from Egypt and I owe Egypt a lot to what I am now.

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

There are many, many books I've read and I think this is quite naïve actually because we all just try to uncover something. But the universe at large is full of questions that we still don't know anything about and there will be always young people brilliant who are going to make new discoveries.

I found with my students they don't necessarily look at journals any more, but they print right away from the internet what's relevant to what's he doing you see.