If you're in the business world, that's what's expected: You should go bust and then start again on something else. So it's a much more relaxed kind of a culture. It's also competitive, but not in such a vicious way. I think the academic world is actually much more destructive of young people.

Mathematics is really an art, not a science.

Aviation is the branch of engineering that is least forgiving of mistakes.

Everything in my life was luck. The key to having an interesting life is to always say "yes" to anything crazy.

The language that nature speaks is the same language that we invented for mathematics. That's just an amazing piece of luck, which we don't understand.

For me, science is just a bunch of tools - it's like playing the violin.

The brain, being analog, is able to grasp images so much better. The brain is just designed for comparing images and some patterns - patterns in space and patterns in time - which we do amazingly well. Computers can do it, too, but not in anything like the same kind of flexibility.