As a kid, I didn't read a great deal of fiction, and I've forgotten most of what I did read.

...and I went into the garden and lay down and looked at the stars in the sky and made myself negligible.

One person looks around and sees a universe created by a god who watches over its long unfurling, marking the fall of sparrows and listening to the prayers of his finest creation. Another person believes that life, in all its baroque complexity, is a chemical aberration that will briefly decorate the surface of a ball of rock spinning somewhere among a billion galaxies. And the two of them could talk for hours and find no great difference between one another, for neither set of beliefs make us kinder or wiser.

Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.

And what he meant was that maths wasn't like life because in life there are no straightforward answers in the end

Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses.

Science and literature give me answers. And they ask me questions I will never be able to answer.