The experimenter dealing with nature faces an outside and often hard world. Natures' curriculum cannot be changed.

Going to school and working for good marks, indeed working for very good marks, was a serious business.

They wanted me to play more sports because they were acutely sensitive to their children being one hundred percent American, and they believed that all Americans played sports and loved sports.

Their educations ended with high school - my father going to work as a clerk and then salesman in a company dealing in printing and stationary, and my mother working as a secretary and then bookkeeper in a firm of wool merchants.

I read everything: fiction, history, science, mathematics, biography, travel.

Experimental science is a craft and an art, and part of the art is knowing when to end a fruitless experiment. There is a danger of becoming obsessed with a fruitless experiment even if it goes nowhere.

There were two free public libraries within walking distance of my home; I remember taking six books home from every visit, the limit set by the library.