My father would conclude his dissertations by saying, "Of course, [Albert] Einstein never believed in gravity. It was a distortion of space." And so my father couldn't believe that an attraction at a distance was a reality.

I was sent to the regular public schools until I had to go to Belmont Hill. Because I wasn't doing anything. The public school was nothing, just a total waste of time.

Boston is not an avant garde place. It stays literally 15 to 20 years behind New York at all times.

[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] was quite a Newtonian in certain ways. But he was an excellent inventor and kept people on their toes.

Stephen Hawking won [Babson Institute competition ] one year with his black hole stuff. It's keeping an open mind on whether gravity exists or not. I think my father believed this because ... when the wind blew on him, he'd get angry, because it was something he couldn't control.

Long John would sometimes hold his interviews in the Carnegie Delicatessen, which is the most famous delicatessen in New York up by Carnegie. Let's see, 57th Street, you're down to like 50th Street and 7th Avenue... You'd go in there and everybody would be eating a heart attack on a plate, pastrami, malts, that kind of stuff. But it literally was the place where Woody Allen would go.