I was always looking ahead. I used to do all kinds of things for entertainment. When I was young, we had no radio, no TV. We were 30 miles from the public library, out in the sticks in Western Kansas, and so I'd do arithmetic exercises.

The planets are never the same twice, they're always different, so they could compare the markings I had drawn with their current photographs and they knew that I was drawing what I was really seeing and it wasn't copied from somewhere.

How does a pansy, for example, select the ingredients from soil to get the right colors for the flower? Now there's a great miracle. I think there's a supreme power behind all of this. I see it in nature.

I used to think about how nice it would be to visit the planets. Of course, I didn't expect to see in my lifetime what has happened. I knew it would happen some day, but it came along faster than I at first thought.

I was interested in telescopes and the way they worked because I had an intense desire to see what things looked like, so I learned how to use telescopes and find things in the sky.

By the time I was in sixth grade I could bound every country in the world from memory.

To me, the noise of a threshing machine is better music than a lot of music I hear nowadays. I took a man's place in the threshing crew when I was only 14 years old.