"Religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself."

"In the 1950s in Columbia, South Carolina, it was considered OK for kids to play with weird things. We could go to the hardware store and buy 100 feet of dynamite fuse."

"The horror of it is, every goddamn thing you look at seems pretty scary to me."

"We are the recipients of scientific method. We can each be a creative and active part of it if we so desire."

"Each of us have things and thoughts and descriptions of an amazing universe in our possession that kings in the 17th Century would have gone to war to possess."

"PCR made it easier to see that certain people are infected with HIV."

"Science consistently produces a new crop of miraculous truths and dazzling devices every year."

"I've been writing about my boyhood, when I was a little kid back on my grandfather's farm where we didn't know about black widow spiders or all that stuff. But writing about that is so easy."

"Do we care about these people that are HIV-positive whose lives have been ruined? Those are the people I'm the most concerned about. Every night I think about this."

"Science grows like a weed every year."

"Here's a bunch of people practising a new set of behavioural norms. Apparently it didn't work because a lot of them got sick. That's the conclusion. You don't necessarily know why it happened. But you start there."

"People don't realize that molecules themselves are somewhat hypothetical, and that their interactions are more so, and that the biological reactions are even more so."

"Sometimes in the morning, when it's a good surf, I go out there, and I don't feel like it's a bad world."

"Law shuttles between freeing us and enslaving us."

"It's not blaming the victim. It's not anybody's fault. They just did something that didn't work, that's all."

"Art is subject to arbitrary fashion."

"The mystery of that damn virus has been generated by the $2 billion a year they spend on it."

"My mother would give my brothers and me a pile of catalogues and let us pick what we wanted for Christmas."

"People realize this man knows what the hell's going on and nobody else does."

"We were fortunate to have the Russians as our childhood enemies. We practiced hiding under our desks in case they had the temerity to drop a nuclear weapon."

"They can't pooh-pooh me now, because of who I am."