Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail.

Failure is central to engineering. Every single calculation that an engineer makes is a failure calculation. Successful engineering is all about understanding how things break or fail.

There's so much written about the Titanic, and it's hard to separate what's fact and what's fiction. My understanding is that the way the Titanic was designed, the emphasis was placed on surviving a head-on collision.

I have always been fascinated by the way things work and how they came to take the form that they did. Writing about these things satisfies my curiosity about the made world while at the same time giving me an opportunity to design a new explanation for the processes that shape it.

Making movies was a real weird kind of adult experience. In a way it was like MIT, in that it was a great education. The big lesson is, people are people. They're smart, funny, creative people, but they're people.

There are large numbers of people in India below the poverty line; there are large numbers of people who lead a meager existence. They want to find a little escape from the hardships of life and come and watch something colorful and exciting and musical. Indian cinema provides that.

I have learned that a bitter experience can make you stronger. I now boastfully say that I have a hide like a rhinoceros... and I'm smiling. It's an interesting thing.

You have to just make the choices you make in life. I made the choices I made because I believed they were right for me.