I grew up in Des Moines. My dad had a house full of books, things like P.G. Wodehouse books and 'Wuthering Heights' by Emily Bronte.
My dad died from pancreatic cancer at 54... I'm making sure I'm eating my vegetables and staying away from the red meat.
I recruited my dad to be my bass player and fired him on several occasions. He stayed on as a bus driver.
There's sometimes a weird benefit to having an alcoholic, violent father. He really motivated me in that I never wanted to be anything like him.
I am not ashamed to say that no man I ever met was my father's equal, and I never loved any other man as much.
My dad believed in scaring us as we were growing up. Scaring the boys who wanted to date us more.
I don't think there's any real motivation for somebody to be a truck driver. Mine was simple; dad was a truck driver, I wanted to own one.
My dad was quite a forbidding figure. I realise now that that was mainly because he worked so hard. He wasn't unkind, but he was a presence.
When I was a boy, my own dad told me in a smiling and wistful way that it's a wise man that knows his own father.
My dad was a surgeon in Egypt. He was a general surgeon. As a little boy I always admired what he was doing, and I wanted to do surgery.
My dad used to say, 'You wouldn't worry so much about what people thought about you if you knew how seldom they did.
I think when I was a kid, and I was in England and it was all about The Stones, The Who, The Kinks and The Beatles and that's what my dad was into.
I can jump on to a kitchen worktop from standing, like Tigger. It was something my dad could do, and I copied it from him.
A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering.
Intelligent design, unlike creationism, is a science in its own right and can stand on its own feet.
I hold with Henry George, that at the back of every great social evil will be found a great political wrong.
There is in my opinion a great similarity between the problems provided by the mysterious behavior of the atom and those provided by the present economic paradoxes confronting the world.
According to 'M' theory, ours is not the only universe. Instead, 'M' theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing.
I hope that seeing the excitement of solving this problem will make young mathematicians realize that there are lots and lots of other problems in mathematics which are going to be just as challenging in the future.
But Wall Street people are in fact very smart; they're funny, they're not company men who work their way up the chain.
The object of pure physics is the unfolding of the laws of the intelligible world; the object of pure mathematics that of unfolding the laws of human intelligence.
