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

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.

If I had been married earlier in life, I wouldn't have seen the double helix. I would have been taking care of the kids on Saturday. On the other hand, I was lonely a lot of the time.

Every time you understand something, religion becomes less likely. Only with the discovery of the double helix and the ensuing genetic revolution have we had grounds for thinking that the powers held traditionally to be the exclusive property of the gods might one day be ours. 5

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

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.

The biggest advantage to believing in God is you don't have to understand anything, no physics, no biology. I wanted to understand.