I'm a very lazy person by nature. I have to be really engaged, and then I go straight from lazy to obsessive. I couldn't study chemistry, but I could memorize all the books for Dungeons and Dragons. It was ridiculous. The trick is to find what I like to do.
“It gets harder and harder to succeed and find audiences with the 500-channel universe, the remote control, and people being so trigger happy with that remote control. It just gets harder to get a foothold.”
“Pure mathematics is on the whole distinctly more useful than applied. For what is useful above all is technique, and mathematical technique is taught mainly through pure mathematics.”