When you're looking that far out, you're giving people their place in the universe, it touches people. Science is often visual, so it doesn't need translation. It's like poetry, it touches you.

That I learned even as a three year-old that I see this world that is really a mess and I learned to say, this is not me. I am not the one that is messed up. It is out there.

Poetry is its own medium; it's very different than writing prose. Poetry can talk in an imagistic sense; it has particular ways of catching an environment.

I'm such a long-term investor, I've never really let go and celebrated what I did with the Hubble telescope.

There really isn't a time to pause and have a celebration. I feel so serious about the whole thing.

I never read a single book as a child. I did not read as a child. I worked on the farm. I had books in the classroom, but that was it. I never read a single book outside of the classroom.

I came from an extraordinarily dysfunctional family, full of abuse and alcoholism. And eventually everyone within the family had committed suicide.

The way you remember the past depends upon your hope for the future.

It's hard to say what drives a three year-old, but I think I had a sense that nature was my solace, and nature was a place in which there was beauty, in which there was order.

I have a great relationship with animals, and with children. I get to their level. I try to see the way a child looks at the world, it's hugely different.

Getting out of the comfortable path, that's what exploration is all about.

Pressure is something you feel when you don't know what the hell you're doing.

Contrary to his infallibly "honest" image, Abe wasn't above lying so long as it served a noble purpose.

There is no innocent sleep so innocent as sleep shared between a woman and a child, the little breath hurrying beside the longer, as a child's foot runs.

No life, if it is properly realized, is without cosmic importance.

For every person that likes you there is going to be a person that doesn't like you. It's the nature of humanity.

Albrecht's Law - Intelligent people, when assembled into an organization, will tend toward collective stupidity.

Lying in bed, I abandoned the facts again and was back in Ambrosia.

The shock caused by the September 11 events has also lead to a thorough reflection on the existing disparity between rich and poor countries, on the misery of populations of the South.

It seems that truth is progressive approximation in which the relative fraction of our spontaneously tolerated residual error constantly diminishes.

When you write songs, you gotta be like a receiving station: you gotta be aware of what's going on around you. I never know what a song is going to be about before I write it.