Thinking can be lateral or "sweaty". For the latter you're better off in an office and following a routine but for the former you have to be "out of your mind", so to speak. So although I recognize the merits of hard work, I find that my work goes stale if I don't go off wandering around the world every few weeks. My friends think I'm a gipsy, but that's when I do "part 1" of my best work.

I've always felt that copious use of the word 'something' allows anyone to solve any problem, even insoluble ones.

Becoming a real researcher has been the ultimate humbling experience for me. Nature is the examiner from hell; if you find new things at all, you always find them the hard way, with sweat and tears. Only then do you notice that there was a really easy way to find them. But this insight rarely arrives before you have been utterly humiliated and reduced to despair.

Inflation is really like drugging the baby universe with speed. The supercool union of the hitherto unfriendly gods was blessed by amphetamine, and this made the universe inflate rather than just expand. The early orgy of expansion in the universe comes to an abrupt end as soon as the supercooled particle stuff finally freezes.

Although the term dialogue was really a euphemism for scientists trying to kill each other, this format worked very well.

The game of science can accurately be described as a never-ending insult to human intelligence.

...it's the process of losing oneself in the jungle that makes science worth doing.