I was so obsessed by this problem that I was thinking about it all the time - when I woke up in the morning, when I went to sleep at night - and that went on for eight years.

I tried to fit it in with some previous broad conceptual understanding of some part of mathematics that would clarify the particular problem I was thinking about.

Pure mathematicians just love to try unsolved problems - they love a challenge.

Always try the problem that matters most to you.

I had this rare privilege of being able to pursue in my adult life, what had been my childhood dream.

Mathematicians aren't satisfied because they know there are no solutions up to four million or four billion, they really want to know that there are no solutions up to infinity.

The definition of a good mathematical problem is the mathematics it generates rather than the problem itself.

I grew up in Cambridge in England, and my love of mathematics dates from those early childhood days.

The greatest problem for mathematicians now is probably the Riemann Hypothesis.

I never use a computer.

However impenetrable it seems, if you don't try it, then you can never do it.

I didn't know who tobelievebutone thing I doknow: when a man islivingmany claim relationshipsthat are hardlysoand after he dies, well, then it's everybody'sparty.

The culture of independent film criticism has totally gone down the drain and this seems to come with the territory of the consumer age that we are now living in.

I realized that there was an intellectual content in music, a kind of thinking, that I would never be able to hear.

Art is the only thing you cannot punch a button for. You must do it the old-fashioned way. Stay up and really burn the midnight oil. There are no compromises.

People aren't social. They're tribal. Race doesn't exist, but tribes are real.

Sometimes he hated that voice in his brain, the one that slapped him upside the head anytime he got too stupid. Funny, it happened a lot with Sienna.

My natural orientation has never been among a community of writers, really. For some reason my social world has always been in the art world.

I don't think looking at things through the prism of fear is going to accomplish anything.

Veni, vidi, visa - I came, I saw, I charged it.

LSD is different. LSD is like psychoanalytical Drano. It's not a personality.