Your job as a scientist is to figure out how you're fooling yourself.

It seemed like my favourite kind of job - a wonderful chance to ask something absolutely fundamental: the fate of the Universe and whether the Universe was infinite or not

Nobody really expects a Nobel Prize call

It is a tough choice between ending up in the cold or ending up in a fiery blast.

You want your mind to be boggled. That is a pleasure in and of itself. And it's more a pleasure if it's boggled by something that you can then demonstrate is really, really true

As a scientist, you feel a sense of team spirit for your country but you also have a sense of team spirit for the international community.

So it's possible that someday, by understanding a little bit more about how the world works, it will come back to help us in some other way that will be surprising