It's fine to work on any problem, so long as it generates interesting mathematics along the way - even if you don't solve it at the end of the day.

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.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

But now that she was dying, I knew everything. My mother was in me already. Not just the parts of her that I knew, but the parts of her that had come before me too.

A goal without actions has the same fate as a vehicle without gas.

A state is an association of similar persons whose aim is the best life possible. What is best is happiness, and to be happy is an active exercise of virtue and a complete employment of it.

My psychiatrist prescribed a game of golf as an antidote to the feelings of euphoria I experience from time to time.

Most of us, I suppose, have a secret country but for most of us it is only an imaginary country. Edmund and Lucy were luckier than other people in that respect.

General statements omit what we really want to know. Example: some horses run faster than others.

I am a firm believer in intelligent design as a matter of faith and intellect, and I believe it should be presented in schools alongside the theories of evolution.

Excellence is not an aspiration. Excellence is what you do in the next five minutes.

Houdini used to pull rabbits out of a hat, but he never tried to make a living out of selling them when he had pulled them out of the hat