You just have to work with what God sends, and if God doesn't seem to understand the concept of commercial success than that's your bad luck.

I've never written a fiction before about real people. . . . I read everything that I could find by people who met them and tried to get some impression of them, but as always when you write fiction, even if you have completely fictitious characters, you start by thinking of what is plausible, what would they say, what would they be likely to do, what would they be likely to think. At some point, if it is every going to come to life, the characters seem to take over and start speaking themselves, and it happened with [COPENHAGEN].

I can understand, he said, that many people, many perfectly ordinary people, have an interesting story to tell. No one's experience of life is valueless.

You can create a good impression on yourself by being right . . . but for creating a good impression on others there's nothing to beat being totally and catastrophically wrong.

We have one set of obligations to the world in general, and we have other sets never to be reconciled to our fellow-countrymen, to our neighbors, to our friends, to our family, to our children.

For hundreds of pages the closely-reasoned arguments unroll, axioms and theorems interlock. And what remains with us in the end? A general sense that the world can be expressed in closely-reasoned arguments, in interlocking axioms and theorems.

When anyone says they often think something, it means they've just thought of it now.