I spent eighteen months as a graduate student in physics at Columbia University, waiting unhappily for an opportunity to work in a laboratory and wondering if I should continue in physics.

I was born in Montreal in 1939, the second son of poor immigrants.

Eight months later, having left Columbia, I was studying physics in a summer program and working in Colorado when I decided to enroll as a graduate student in biophysics.

For our immediate family and relatives, Canada was a land of opportunity.

About seven years later I was given a book about the periodic table of the elements. For the first time I saw the elegance of scientific theory and its predictive power.

The RNA World referred to an hypothetical stage in the origin of life on Earth.

Nevertheless, as is a frequent occurrence in science, a general hypothesis was constructed from a few specific instances of a phenomenon.

I should mention that while I was growing up, Einstein was presented as a worthy role model for a young boy who was good at his studies.

My intention was to enroll at McGill University but an unexpected series of events led me to study physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

It's weird when you wake of from a bad dream and everything is still bad.

Purpose is a higher level of living, where you live more for others than you live for yourself.

I worked a lot with Mark Frankel, and he was really just an incredibly tender soul. He liked his hair just so and his suit. He was a good-looking man, and he cared about looking together.

I can never predict what's going to happen.

Swearing was invented as a compromise between running away and fighting.

I'm basically a control freak. It's not because I want to be. I'm not at all into the power play that's involved in it.

Nobody notices when things go right.

The study of law is sublime, and its practice vulgar.

The unchangeable can only be realised in silence. Once realised, it will deeply affect the changeable, itself remaining unaffected.

Man desires to be free and he desires to feel important. This places him in a dilemma, for the more he emancipates himself from necessity the less important he feels.