The years since the Nobel Prize have been productive ones for me.

A souvenir of those years is a small cottage on the cliffs of Cornwall, where Joyce and I spend a spring month every year, hiking and seeing friends.

My belief is based on the fact that string theory is the first science in hundreds of years to be pursued in pre-Baconian fashion, without any adequate experimental guidance.

The Nobel Prize gives one the opportunity to take public stands.

Feynman's cryptic remark, "no one is that much smarter ...," to me, implies something Feynman kept emphasizing: that the key to his achievements was not anything "magical" but the right attitude, the focus on nature's reality, the focus on asking the right questions, the willingness to try (and to discard) unconventional answers, the sensitive ear for phoniness, self-deception, bombast, and conventional but unproven assumptions.

I acquired an admiration for Japanese culture, art, and architecture, and learned of the existence of the game of GO, which I still play.

The first months at Harvard were more than challenging, as I came to the realization that the humanities could be genuinely interesting, and, in fact, given the weaknesses of my background, very difficult.