I will say that growing up as a kid in an urban environment and having lived in cities all my life, the one achievement that everyone can look forward to is getting the perfect parking spot

Astronomers ought to be able to ask fundamental questions without accelerators

If you ask almost any of them, do you stand behind your theory, is this the answer, I think they would almost every one say that no, no, no, I'm just trying to expand the range of possibilities. We really don't know what is going on.

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

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