Nothing new that is really interesting comes without collaboration

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.

At lunch Francis [Crick] winged into the Eagle to tell everyone within hearing distance that we had found the secret of life.

A goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.

DNA was my only gold rush. I regarded DNA as worth a gold rush.

[As a young man ] I came to the conclusion that the church was just a bunch of fascists that supported Franco. I stopped going on Sunday mornings and watched the birds with my father instead.

I recently went to my staircase at Clare College, Cambridge and there were women there! There have been a lot of convincing studies recently about the loss of productivity in the Western male. It may be that entertainment culture now is so engaging that it keeps people satisfied. We didn't have that. Science was much more fun than listening to the radio. When you are 16 or 17 and in that inherently semi-lonely period when you are deciding whether to be an intellectual, many now don't bother.