Try hard to find out what you're good at and what your passions are, and where the two converge, and build your life around that.

We are all very individual. You have to find out what you can do best, and be self-conscious about that.

I was making a lot of momentous personal decisions. I was still very very young: when the prize was awarded, I was 33; the work I had done when I was 21.

So many of the things I've predicted were technologies that were just sitting right in front of us.

My ambitions were already very clearly fixed by the time I was 6 or 7.

Life's a hobby.

If you wanted to dissect the structure of living cells, genetic analysis was an extremely powerful method, so my interest turned to that.

If you want to solve very complex problems, you will have to end up letting machines work out a lot of the details for themselves, and in ways that we don't understand what they are doing.

If lifespan jumps by 30 or 40 years, that has enormous implications.

If it takes you 20 or 25 years to establish yourself in one field, you really ought to be careful not to stray too far.

I'm not easily inhibited by the fact that I don't know something about a subject. It doesn't stop me from dabbling in it.

I'm chairing a UNESCO committee on how to improve global Internet communications for science; help third-world people get onto the Net so they can be part of the process.

I'd like to put in a vote for the intrinsic fascination of science.

I wish I had a talent for dropping things as well as taking on new ones. It gets to be quite a clutter after a while.

I was reading five or six years ahead of my grade during public school. I was pretty bored. I made a contract with some of my teachers that if I didn't ask too many questions, I could work in the back of the room.