I'm basically a libertarian. I don't want to restrict anyone from doing anything unless it's going to harm me. I don't want [to] pass a law stopping someone from smoking. It's just too dangerous. You lose the concept of a free society. Since we are genetically so diverse and our brains are so different, we're going to have different aspirations.

The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that my father didn't believe in God, and so he had no hang-ups about souls.

Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles.

My heroes were never scientists. They were Graham Greene and Christopher Isherwood, you know, good writers.

Remember, grab you're future with both hands and mold it into what you want it to be. It's the determined, who create the life they want, while the idle sit by and watch it fade away into nothingness. The future belongs to the exceptional individuals, who can see the light of the future, at the end of the tunnel.

The way to do great science is to stay away from subjects that are overpopulated, and go to the frontiers.

Science moves with the spirit of an adventure characterized both by youthful arrogance and by the belief that the truth, once found, would be simple as well as pretty.