No one ever won a chess game by betting on each move. Sometimes you have to move backward to get a step forward.

The excitement level for me working on projects is really not a bit different from when I was 26.

The prejudice was so bad in the United States at that time that a dark person with a white person would not be served in a restaurant. My father, mother, and I would try it occasionally. We would sit there, and the food would never come.

But today the quickest way to save your bottom line is to cut off research.

I loved music, and in my ninth year at MIT, I decided to buy a hi-fi set. I figured that all I needed to do was look at the specifications. So I bought what looked like the best one, turned it on, and turned it off in five minutes, the sound was so poor.

I would have been fired a hundred times at a company run by M.B.A.’s. But I never went into business to make money. I went into business so that I could do interesting things that hadn’t been done before.

I really wanted to do research. That has never changed.