My life has been extremely complicated. Not by choice at the beginning at all, but later on, I had become used to complication and went on accepting things that other people would have found too difficult to accept.

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

I didn't feel comfortable at first with pure mathematics, or as a professor of pure mathematics. I wanted to do a little bit of everything and explore the world.

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

The existence of these patterns [fractals] challenges us to study forms that Euclid leaves aside as being formless, to investigate the morphology of the amorphous. Mathematicians have disdained this challenge, however, and have increasingly chosen to flee from nature by devising theories unrelated to anything we can see or feel.

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

My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.