Why were the Europeans bothered about the Soviet Union at all? It was nothing to do with us. China had nothing to do with us. Why were we not building, without reference to the Soviet Union, a good society in our own countries? But no, we were all - in one way or another - obsessed with the bloody Soviet Union, which was a disaster. What people were supporting was failure. And continually justifying it.

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

It's lovely to have money to give away - that's the bonus of winning the Nobel.

One certainty we all accept is the condition of being uncertain and insecure.

I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.

I have a daughter and two grand-daughters and a great grandson in Africa, in Cape Town.

Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape.