I'm really optimistic in the mornings.

I'm not politically correct.

In the 1950s in Columbia, South Carolina, it was considered OK for kids to play with weird things. We could go to the hardware store and buy 100 feet of dynamite fuse.

Law shuttles between freeing us and enslaving us.

Science grows like a weed every year.

Here's a bunch of people practising a new set of behavioural norms. Apparently it didn't work because a lot of them got sick. That's the conclusion. You don't necessarily know why it happened. But you start there.

We are the recipients of scientific method. We can each be a creative and active part of it if we so desire.

We were fortunate to have the Russians as our childhood enemies. We practiced hiding under our desks in case they had the temerity to drop a nuclear weapon.

It's not blaming the victim. It's not anybody's fault. They just did something that didn't work, that's all.

Religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself.

I can say exactly what I feel about any issue, and I'm going to do that.

Do we care about these people that are HIV-positive whose lives have been ruined? Those are the people I'm the most concerned about. Every night I think about this.

PCR made it easier to see that certain people are infected with HIV.

The horror of it is, every goddamn thing you look at seems pretty scary to me.

I've been writing about my boyhood, when I was a little kid back on my grandfather's farm where we didn't know about black widow spiders or all that stuff. But writing about that is so easy.

Art is subject to arbitrary fashion.

They can't pooh-pooh me now, because of who I am.

The mystery of that damn virus has been generated by the $2 billion a year they spend on it.

Science consistently produces a new crop of miraculous truths and dazzling devices every year.

People don't realize that molecules themselves are somewhat hypothetical, and that their interactions are more so, and that the biological reactions are even more so.

My mother would give my brothers and me a pile of catalogues and let us pick what we wanted for Christmas.

Sometimes in the morning, when it's a good surf, I go out there, and I don't feel like it's a bad world.

Each of us have things and thoughts and descriptions of an amazing universe in our possession that kings in the 17th Century would have gone to war to possess.

People realize this man knows what the hell's going on and nobody else does.

I'm really optimistic in the mornings.

I like writing about biology, not doing it.

I love a microphone and a big crowd; I'm an entertainer, I guess.

If reincarnation is a useful biological idea it is certain that somewhere in the universe it will happen.

My grandfather milked several cows twice a day and supplied the neighbours with dairy products. He liked to go visiting around the county on Saturdays, and he also enjoyed the neighbours when they came by once a week with their empty milk jars. He walked them out to their cars and hung over the driver's side window until they drove off.

Scientists are doing an awful lot of damage to the world in the name of helping it. I don't mind attacking my own fraternity because I am ashamed of it.

You can't ask your pharmacist to stock larger quantities of potassium nitrate because you want to make a bigger rocket.

You make observations, write theories to fit them, try experiments to disprove the theories and, if you can't, you've got something.

Natural DNA is a tractless coil like an unwound and tangled audiotape on the floor of the car in the dark.

It's difficult to tell the truth about how a book begins. The truth, as far as it can be presented to other people, is either wholly banal or too intimate.

Here we are the most clever species ever to have lived. So how is it we can destroy the only planet we have

I have departed from this planet and I have left behind my poor earthly ones with their occupations which are as many as they are useless; at last I am living in the scintillating splendor of the stars, each of which used to seem to me as large as millions of suns.

I think graphic novels are closer to prose than film, which is a really different form.

I'm friends with most of my exes because I'm sort of proud of my ex list. I've dated some really great girls.

The question of feasibility, the question of cost, the question of including partners elsewhere in the world, the question of the effect of this project on arms agreements - all these issues are in discussion.

Those who would make us feel, must feel themselves.

Drawing is a kind of hypnotism one looks in such a way at the model that he comes and takes a seat on the paper.

Preschool children are virtuosos of imagination.

More than conventional picture books, the notebook format allows me to leap from words to images, and this free-flowing back-and-forth inspires my best work. It reflects the way I think - sometimes visually, sometimes verbally - with the pictures not there just to illustrate the text but to replace it, to tell their own story.

We must do more to protect our neighborhoods and give integrity to our community plans.

No serious futurist deals in prediction. These are left for television oracles and newspaper astrologers.

I'm made to ride a bike, not do washing.

I don't know who I touch and who I don't. I work hard trying to make people laugh. I try to do the kind of stuff that made me laugh growing up. I don't have any secrets. I don't know the reasons I've been so well received.

There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles the Second. But the seamen were not gentlemen; and the gentlemen were not seamen.

I've always enjoyed interleague play. It gives you a chance to see different clubs, to go to different places. It gives you a good chance to see where you are, where you stand with other teams.