Growing up in Highland Park, in high school, I had some very influential teachers: I had a math teacher who taught calculus that helped me learn to be in love with mathematics; I had a chemistry teacher who inspired us to work what was in the class and to go beyond.

As a young boy growing up on the South Side of Chicago, I was inspired by the nascent space age.

I see no difference between scientific exploration and human exploration.

I think that space exploration as a broad activity is the most important things that humans can do. I've always found it fascinating, interesting, compelling, and I have a drive to go out into space.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

When I was in seventh grade, I was bored out of my mind. We seemed to be learning the same things over and over in science and math, and two of the boys in my class were allowed to move ahead into these advanced classes, but I wasn't allowed because I was a girl.

Physics does not change the nature of the world it studies, and no science of behavior can change the essential nature of man, even though both sciences yield technologies with a vast power to manipulate the subject matters.

With computer science, I had to go through that uncomfortable process of my brain establishing a hash table, if you will - the coders will get that - for this new information, because I didn't have one. So I had to establish a brand-new file system from scratch.