Boiled down to one sentence, my message is the unboundedness of life and the unboundedness of human destiny.

I think it's a big mistake to decide too soon what you're going to do with your life.

The media always tries to make everything into a disaster, but it's mostly rubbish.

I am acutely aware of the fact that the marriage between mathematics and physics, which was so enormously fruitful in past centuries, has recently ended in divorce.

Scientifically speaking, a butterfly is at least as mysterious as a superstring. When something ceases to be mysterious it ceases to be of absorbing interest to scientists. Almost all things scientists think and dream about are mysterious.

For me, science is just a bunch of tools - it's like playing the violin. I just enjoy calculating, and it's an instrument I know how to play. It's almost an athletic performance, in a way. I was just watching the Olympics, and that's how I feel when proving a theorem.

The world is just - it's wonderful when you look at all the detail. It's just amazing.