My education at Baron Byng High School was excellent, with dedicated masters (boys and girls were separate).

Growing up, mostly in Montreal, I was an only child of loving parents.

Being exposed to theory, stimulated by a basic love of concepts and mathematics, was a marvelous experience.

Life would be indeed easier if the experimentalists would only pause for a little while!

My interest in the sciences started with mathematics in the very beginning, and later with chemistry in early high school and the proverbial home chemistry set.

During my McGill years, I took a number of math courses, more than other students in chemistry.

After a subsequent interview at Brooklyn Poly, I was hired, and life as a fully independent researcher began.

After some minor pieces of theoretical study that I worked on, a student in my statistical mechanics class brought to my attention a problem in polyelectrolytes.

My life as a working theorist began three months after this preliminary study and background reading, when Oscar gently nudged me toward working on a particular problem.

I have always loved going to school.

Believe in something important. Pursue it wholeheartedly.

The size of a plane does not change the weather but it will get you above it. The size of your faith may not change your situation but it will get you over it.

Things wrote with labor deserve to be so read and will last their age.

I think there's a down-to-earthness with Midwesterners and with people from the Midlands - which is where my family is from - in Ireland.

Shut your evil mucus-hole you truth terrorist. You LOSE every time a mirror implodes from your barbed and gristle image.

Bury the hatchet, but leave the handle sticking out.

It's a place where I could do something on a weekly basis and see if I like it.

The Curse of poverty has no justification in our age...The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct and immediate abolition of poverty.

Newspapermen learn to call a murderer "an alleged murderer" and the King of England "the alleged King of England" in order to avoid libel suits.

What is it, I wonder, that makes two people suddenly become important to each other? So important that everything else around them just fades away?