It is odd, but on the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums, the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics.

In fact the total amount that a physicist knows is very little. He has only to remember the rules to get him from one place to another and he is all right.

It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of stars-mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere". I too see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? ...What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined 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.

Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.

If you keep proving stuff that others have done, getting confidence, increasing the complexities of your solutions - for the fun of it - then one day you'll turn around and discover that nobody actually did that one! And that's the way to become a computer scientist.