A patent, or invention, is any assemblage of technologies or ideas that you can put together that nobody put together that way before. That's how the patent office defines it. That's an invention

I think we have a society which is spending more and more of its money on healthcare as a percent of GDP as a percent of a lot of things. I think that's a measure of success.

My biggest worry is I'm running out of time and energy. Thirty years ago I thought 10 years was a really long time.

In some cases, inventions prohibit innovation because we're so caught up in playing with the technology, we forget about the fact that it was supposed to be important.

To me, innovations are the wheel, fire, language, movable type. There are not 3 million innovations; there are 3 million inventions

I don't work on a project unless I believe that it will dramatically improve life for a bunch of people.

People take the longest possible paths, digress to numerous dead ends, and make all kinds of mistakes. Then historians come along and write summaries of this messy, nonlinear process and make it appear like a simple, straight line.