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

An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something.

Both chaos theory and fractal have had contacts in the past when they are both impossible to develop and in a certain sense not ready to be developed.

When people ask me what's my field? I say, on one hand, a fractalist. Perhaps the only one, the only full-time one.

A formula can be very simple, and create a universe of bottomless complexity.

One of the high points of my life was when I suddenly realized that this dream I had in my late adolescence of combining pure mathematics, very pure mathematics with very hard things which had been long a nuisance to scientists and to engineers, that this combination was possible and I put together this new geometry of nature, the fractal geometry of nature.

One couldn't even measure roughness. So, by luck, and by reward for persistence, I did found the theory of roughness, which certainly I didn't expect and expecting to found one would have been pure madness.