I guess the two things I was most interested in were telescopes and steam engines. My father was an engineer on a threshing rig steam engine and I loved the machinery.

You have to compete with others in the field. Sometimes the competition gets pretty fierce because you're competing for funds or grants to do your work, the financial work.

A person that much interested in science is going to neglect his social life somewhat, but not completely, because that isn't healthy either. So one has to work it out according to one's own inclinations, how one wants to proportion these things.

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.

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.

When I was in the fourth grade, I became intensely interested in geography and I learned it well.

Young man, I am afraid you are wasting your time. If there were any more planets they would have been found long before this.