My first attempts to transmit typhus to laboratory animals, including the smaller species of monkeys, had failed, as had those of my predecessors, for reasons which I can easily supply today

School is indeed a training for later life not because it teaches the 3 Rs (more or less), but because it instills the essential cultural nightmare fear of failure, envy of success, and absurdity.

Up to a certain point anxiety is good, for it promotes action. Beyond that point we freeze any fixed attitudes or rush about without thinking deeply from one decision to another.

A competitive culture endures by tearing people down.

Most of the doctors in the Tunisian administration, especially those in country districts, contracted typhus and approximately one third of them died of it

Of all the problems which were open to me for study, typhus was the most urgent and the most unexplored. We knew nothing of the way in which contagion spread

I was less successful in my attempts to effect preventive vaccination against typhus by using the virus and in trying to produce large quantities of serum using large animals

I rebel

I always wanted to be a comedian and actor. I basically stumbled into the music medium, though. I'm OK, but that's about it. I like to think I'm good enough not to negatively affect the performance.

I wrote about four novels before I wrote a word of journalism.

Our pride has grown in the last twenty-five years, though others don't understand it and underestimate it.

For there is some virtue or other to be exercised, whatever happens.

People think I'm thick because of the characters I play. I think I'm brighter than the characters. Well, I hope I am.

All those days of waiting on tables until I could get a role on Broadway, all that time going to school taking lessons, and all those years of being a nobody following a dream-and now here it is.

Genes are biochemical recipes written in a four-letter alphabet called DNA.

During the Gold Rush, most would-be miners lost money, but people who sold them picks, shovels, tents and blue-jeans (Levi Strauss) made a nice profit.

Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go.