[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.

[Buckminster Fuller] could do four, five hours straight where some people would leave, eat, get a snooze and come back and he's still going. He was like a fireplug.

I think [H. P. Lovecraft] knew the whole gamut. He just didn't believe any of it! He probably liked to use the esoteric stuff because he knew it would tick people off and freak them out.

[Nikola Tesla] would do it through lucid dreaming. He would, in a sense, dream up the engine, forget about it, come back, and then discover where it was wearing. You know, where the parts were wearing out. Now, that's inner visualization and a half! And that was the secret of why he did so many inventions.

I would be constantly brought up on the carpet by these teachers who were brought up with Abstract Expressionism, saying, "You're too uptight, you're not expressing yourself, why don't you feel freer?" I said, "Well, I don't like that stuff. It means nothing to me."

In other words, [ H.P. Lovecraft] was areligious, asexual, neurasthenic, he just didn't want to react to the world. Like Virginia Woolf, who considered religion the ultimate obscenity.

The Babson Institute, which is now an actual university, was started by this guy [my father] who also had a problem with believing in gravity. And so he started the Babson Institute in New Boston, New Hampshire, which then moved to Gloucester. Each year they have a competition of one thousand dollars for one thousand words of an essay on gravity. That's the way they do it.