I came from an extraordinarily dysfunctional family, full of abuse and alcoholism. And eventually everyone within the family had committed suicide.

I never read a single book as a child. I did not read as a child. I worked on the farm. I had books in the classroom, but that was it. I never read a single book outside of the classroom.

I'm such a long-term investor, I've never really let go and celebrated what I did with the Hubble telescope.

The statistics of life out there and the statistics of intelligent beings and advanced civilization is a certainty, the way I look at it. It has not been accepted, because we've been in an anthropocentric era.

I think there are huge lessons there, for young people who are getting started in life, as well as other people. And that is, to take responsibility for your own life. Only you are responsible for the course you take from there.

And so, I was not a military test pilot, but as soon as NASA expressed an interest in flying scientists and people who were not military test pilots, that was an epiphany that just came like a stroke of lightning.

I've already written 300 space poems. But I look upon my ultimate form as being a poetic prose. When you read it, it appears to be prose, but within the prose you have embedded the techniques of poetry.