I spent my time very nicely in many ways, but not fully satisfactory. Then I became Professor in France, but realized that I was not - for the job that I should spend my life in.

Now that I near 80, I realize with wistful pleasure that on many occasions I was 10, 20, 40, even 50 years ahead of my time.

There are very complex shapes which would be the same from close by and far away.

Pictures were completely eliminated from mathematics; in particular when I was young this happened in a very strong fashion.

Everybody in mathematics had given up for 100 years or 200 years the idea that you could from pictures, from looking at pictures, find new ideas. That was the case long ago in the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance, in later periods, but then mathematicians had become very abstract.

I went to the computer and tried to experiment. I introduced a very high level of experiment in very pure mathematics.

Think not of what you see, but what it took to produce what you see.