I think [Nikola Tesla] was always like that. And so it was inevitable that he would be an inventor. Because it was so easy for him to think fourth-dimensionally, dynamically. It wasn't just a static thing with him. In other words, it isn't the way an architect thinks, which is essentially static.

I would say that it's probably impossible for a lot of people to even think what H.P. Lovecraft's theological state was.

I began to analyze the movie [The Day the Earth Stood Still] and said it was really made out of these two characters [Nikola Tesla and Leon Teremin] who were brought together. That made it fascinating to me. And especially the language they made up, that Klaatu speaks. Because it has a Latin word order. It's like medieval Latin, but it had some Navajo phonemes in it and that kind of stuff.

When [my father] reached his majority, he was the head of the family. Everybody depended upon him. He went into a very uptight appearance; he would wear Chesterfield coats to work, Homburg hats, really getting into the whole thing. He knew people like Oscar Levant. He loved New York. He wanted to live there.

I hear some guy teaches a course in diagrammatic thinking now; he's written books on it and stuff like that, and so it was kind of natural for me. Because it was a way in which words naturally fitted into something that's visual. I was always interested in doing that.

[Nikola Tesla] said he had no interest in the spiritual. He didn't believe in telepathy, didn't believe in any of that stuff, didn't believe in any religion, and he just thought all these people were being superstitious and wanted them to go away. And in that way he was very close to H.P. Lovecraft, who was almost a believing atheist.

Walter C. Wright has a more cogent presentation than my father did about [gravity] being a push. But he had the same basic belief, that the idea of magnetism attracting something was not the reason why the effects of what we call gravity occur.