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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Science grows like a weed every year.

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.

Art is subject to arbitrary fashion.

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

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.

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

I like writing about biology, not doing it.

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

I'm not driven by being understood.

I'm not politically correct.

I'm really optimistic in the mornings.

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

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