I was in an industrial laboratory because academia found me unsuitable

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

The most important thing I have done is to combine something esoteric with a practical issue that affects many people.

Order doesn't come by itself.

I conceived, developed and applied in many areas a new geometry of nature, which finds order in chaotic shapes and processes. It grew without a name until 1975, when I coined a new word to denote it, fractal geometry, from the Latin word for irregular and broken up, fractus. Today you might say that, until fractal geometry became organized, my life had followed a fractal orbit.

For most of my life, one of the persons most baffled by my own work was myself.

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.