The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each neuron connected to 10 thousand other neurons. Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe.

What we usually consider as impossible are simply engineering problems... there's no law of physics preventing them.

It's pointless to have a nice clean desk, because it means you're not doing anything.

Impossible is relative.

Language and emotions are too easily misread. For example, laughing can mean many things: laughing with you or at you. Does that laugh reflect joy, anger, or that s/he's about to fire you? Too many jobs require complex feelings, pattern recognition, common sense, and the human touch.

Our best shot at finding life in our solar system might be to look at the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Mars, increasingly, looks like a dead planet. But the oceans beneath the ice cover of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn may actually have more liquid water than the oceans of Earth.

So often, science fiction helps to get young people interested in science. That's why I don't mind talking about science fiction. It has a real role to play: to seize the imagination.