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

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

The remoteness of my parents from the schools, so unfashionable today, was often painful for me, but I learned early to deal with an outside and sometimes hard world.

I learned quickly, as I tell my graduate students now, there are no answers in the back of the book when the equipment doesn't work or the measurements look strange.

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

Whatever the course, whether the course was boring or interesting to me, whether I was talented in mathematics or not talented in languages, my parents expected A's.

It was good fortune to be a child during the Depression years and a youth during the war years.