On hearing the news [of being awarded a Nobel Prize], a friend who knows me only too well, sent me this laconic message: 'Blood, toil, sweat and tears always were a good mixture'.

For Christmas, 1939, a girl friend gave me a book token which I used to buy Linus Pauling's recently published Nature of the Chemical Bond. His book transformed the chemical flatland of my earlier textbooks into a world of three-dimensional structures.

I rarely plan my research; it plans me.

People are best judged by their actions

Women's liberation could have not succeeded if science had not provided them with contraception and household technology.

Could the search for ultimate truth really have revealed so hideous and visceral looking an object?

What is known for certain is dull.