For much of my life there was no place where the things I wanted to investigate were of interest to anyone.

Beautiful, damn hard, increasingly useful. That's fractals.

I don't seek power and do not run around

The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market

I didn't want to become a pure mathematician, as a matter of fact, my uncle was one, so I knew what the pure mathematician was and I did not want to be a pure - I wanted to do something different.

I had very, very little training in taking an exam to determine a scientist's life in France.

I was in an industrial laboratory because academia found me unsuitable