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.

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.

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

It is sometimes said that we should never believe a scientific theory until it is verified by experiment. But a famous astronomer has also stated that we should never believe an observation until it is confirmed by a theory.

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

For instance, the blood of hibernating arctic squirrels may supercool to minus 3 degrees, when it would normally congeal. The supercooled blood still flows, since it remains a liquid, but the slightest disturbance will cause it to freeze, killing the squirrel; therefore, you should not disturb hibernating arctic squirrels.

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