The electron is a theory we use; it is so useful in understanding the way nature works that we can almost call it real.

If I could explain it to the average person, I wouldn't have been worth the Nobel Prize.

You should not fool the laymen when you're talking as a scientist... . I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, [an integrity] that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.

No one really understands quantum mechanics.

If all of this, all the life of a stream of water, can be nothing but a pile of atoms, how much more is possible?

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.

We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work, although, there has been in these days, some interest in this kind of thing.