What you do is, you have your drawing board and a pencil in hand at the telescope. You look in and you make some markings on the paper and you look in again.

I was interested in telescopes and the way they worked because I had an intense desire to see what things looked like, so I learned how to use telescopes and find things in the sky.

I guess they just took it for granted that that was what I was interested in and let nature take its course.

It was depressing, very depressing. I worried about how I would make a living. I didn't want to stay on the farm. It didn't offer the challenge I wanted and yet, without a college education, I felt that I was really out of luck.

We were suddenly faced with the necessity of training a lot of young men in the art of navigation.

I think there's a supreme power behind the whole thing, an intelligence. Look at all of the instincts of nature, both animals and plants, the very ingenious ways they survive. If you cut yourself, you don't have to think about it.

I realized that I would have some very tough sledding, and I was very discouraged because I didn't see much hope of getting into the field I wanted to get into with no college education.

The planets are never the same twice, they're always different, so they could compare the markings I had drawn with their current photographs and they knew that I was drawing what I was really seeing and it wasn't copied from somewhere.

I was always looking ahead. I used to do all kinds of things for entertainment. When I was young, we had no radio, no TV. We were 30 miles from the public library, out in the sticks in Western Kansas, and so I'd do arithmetic exercises.

I shed many a tear when the steam engines went out of style on the railroads. I'd like to seem them come back, but I realize the diesels are more efficient.

I used to believe there were people on Mars, and of course now we know there aren't. Mars held particular interest. I was curious what kind of beings they would look like.

What you do is, you have your drawing board and a pencil in hand at the telescope. You look in and you make some markings on the paper and you look in again.

I used to think about how nice it would be to visit the planets. Of course, I didn't expect to see in my lifetime what has happened. I knew it would happen some day, but it came along faster than I at first thought.

By the time I was in sixth grade I could bound every country in the world from memory.

I have a lot of sympathy for young people because I realize how disturbed I was. How would I deal with life in the future? What would I do for a living?

A person that much interested in science is going to neglect his social life somewhat, but not completely, because that isn't healthy either. So one has to work it out according to one's own inclinations, how one wants to proportion these things.

I thought I'd better check this third plate, which is another date, see if there's an image there in the right place that would be consistent with the images on the other plates. That was the final proof.

Although my early equipment was very modest, later I made my own and they were more powerful.

How does a pansy, for example, select the ingredients from soil to get the right colors for the flower? Now there's a great miracle. I think there's a supreme power behind all of this. I see it in nature.

When I was in the fourth grade, I became intensely interested in geography and I learned it well.

To me, the noise of a threshing machine is better music than a lot of music I hear nowadays. I took a man's place in the threshing crew when I was only 14 years old.

You wonder about it and wonder how will I make an instrument that can handle this kind of a problem.

I guess the two things I was most interested in were telescopes and steam engines. My father was an engineer on a threshing rig steam engine and I loved the machinery.

Can you imagine young people nowadays making a study of trigonometry for the fun of it? Well I did.

You have to compete with others in the field. Sometimes the competition gets pretty fierce because you're competing for funds or grants to do your work, the financial work.

Unfortunately, a lot of the concepts in the Bible are based on ancient mythology that doesn't fit the findings of science.

That's the way I got along in life. I don't ever remember being particularly jealous of anybody, because I figured if I can't do it myself, I don't deserve to get it.

I think the driving thing was curiosity about the universe. That fascinated me. I didn't think anything about being famous or anything like that, I was just interested in the concepts involved.

It was an amazing experience to work with Michael Jackson, who is a legend.

She was what we used to call a suicide blonde - dyed by her own hand.

Eventually I figured out there was something systematic in the way women are treated.

The interesting thing about improvisation is you're making something up in front of the audience. Now music helps you out a little bit because you have an instrument that'll separate you from the audience.

Microsoft has a monopoly over the desktop operating systems.

When your mom placed you in my arms after your birth, little did I know that she was placing you directly in my heart.

Most people think of Las Vegas, and they think of extravagance. But it's really a mix between fantasy and laziness.

I'm definitely a singer-songwriter. I'm somewhere in the vein between Elliott Smith and Jack Johnson.

You learn from the things that happen in your career. You get up and down. You never give up. All the things that happened in my career, thank God it happened early rather than late in my career.

It is a belief of the mediocre that extreme effort kills.

I said nothing for a time just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.

The backbone of surprise is fusing speed with secrecy.

That's a job that it makes a few friendships, but it probably breaks more.

I'm an iPod person.

Any transition serious enough to alter your definition of self will require not just small adjustments in your way of living and thinking but a full-on metamorphosis.

So many things that we never will undo I know youre sorry Im sorry too.

If I could reach up and hold a star for every time youve made me smile. The entire sky would be in the palm of my hand.

I've seen a big shift, especially in my classroom, with women standing up and demanding respect. That's in every woman, whether 16, 26, 56.

The demons that make a person afraid are the hardest to cast out.

Well, I don't think I've ever consciously come up with tricks and tools to, kind of, hide. I do think I'm a bit more vigilant, in terms of safety issues and things. And sometimes it is kind of nice to try to hold onto your anonymity.

What I say on a record and what I say off a record is two different things. And that's always been the case. There's a difference between confidence on a record and arrogance.