A good mathematical joke is better, and better mathematics, than a dozen mediocre papers.

Before creation, God did just pure mathematics. Then He thought it would be a pleasant change to do some applied.

Try a hard problem. You may not solve it, but you will prove something else.

The first test of potential in mathematics is whether you can get anything out of geometry.

The infinitely competent can be uncreative.

The surprising thing about this paper is that a man who could write it would.

A precisian professor had the habit of saying: "... quartic polynomial ax^4+bx^3+cx^2+dx+e , where e need not be the base of the natural logarithms."

I've been giving this lecture to first-year classes for over twenty-five years. You'd think they would begin to understand it by now.

A linguist would be shocked to learn that if a set is not closed this does not mean that it is open, or again that "E is dense in E" does not mean the same thing as "E is dense in itself".

I listen only to Bach, Beethoven or Mozart. Life is too short to waste on other composers.

Mathematics is a dangerous profession; an appreciable proportion of us go mad.

When you establish peace, when you etablish love, when you establish kindness here [inside], you cannot act any other way to the outside world.

The first years of man must make provision for the last.

I have to say I've been lucky in that way in that I've been able to go from different films and different genres with different challenges.

There is no greater hell than to be a prisoner of fear.

How am I placing myself in the world of other people around me? For me, I feel that I am not really alone, that others can feel it too. I see art in this way.

In the whole world, there was no better place than being wrapped in him.

If anything unfolds, it's supposed to

I tell my kids, 'I am thinking about you every other minute of my day.'

I didn't feel I had to prove anything more.

Nice: meaning I'm going to be dating leather-wearing alcoholics and complaining about them - to you.