I rarely plan my research; it plans me.

I saw Linus Pauling as a brilliant lecturer and a man with a fantastic memory, and a great, great showman. I think he was the century's greatest chemist. No doubt about it.

A discovery is like falling in love and reaching the top of a mountain after a hard climb all in one, an ecstasy not induced by drugs but by the revelation of a face of nature that no one has seen before and that often turns out to be more subtle and wonderful than anyone had imagined.

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

People are best judged by their actions

Discoveries cannot be planned, they pop up, like Puck, in unexpected corners

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.