The number of e-mails and letters that I get from choreographers, from sculptors, from composers who are being inspired by science is huge.

No matter how hard you try to teach your cat general relativity, you're going to fail.

I can't stand clutter. I can't stand piles of stuff. And whenever I see it, I basically just throw the stuff away.

I wouldn't say that The Fabric of the Cosmos is a book on cosmology. Cosmology certainly plays a big part, but the major theme is our ever-evolving understanding of space and time, and what it all means for our sense of reality.

Intelligence is the ability to take in information from the world and to find patterns in that information that allow you to organize your perceptions and understand the external world.

For most people, the major hurdle in grasping modern insights into the nature of the universe is that these developments are usually phrased using mathematics.

Relativity challenges your basic intuitions that you've built up from everyday experience. It says your experience of time is not what you think it is, that time is malleable. Your experience of space is not what you think it is; it can stretch and shrink.