CEOs are pinch hitters. We should be working on the things that nobody else can or nobody else is.

The cerebral part of the game is the most challenging part of the game.

I myself, as I’m writing, don’t know who did it. The readers and I are on the same ground. When I start to write a story, I don’t know the conclusion at all and I don’t know what’s going to happen next. If there is a murder case as the first thing, I don’t know who the killer is. I write the book because I would like to find out. If I know who the killer is, there’s no purpose to writing the story.

Right. And let’s put Michelangelo in quotes, ’cause was he really the one who actually said that? But, anyway, the idea still holds. I feel that whatever I’m writing exists already. Maybe that’s because of a glitch in the space-time continuum and when I write I’m actually putting my living self behind the present moment in time. Like I’m following something through the woods. Eyes open. Ears open. Heart open. And I’m following a path that is sometimes behind me.

He really was a major force in my life…So he was always supportive of my decisions vis-à-vis education. And very generous…He was in many ways.

I am not one of the new media experts working all the time with my computers and the PowerPoint’s and things of that sort. So, I’m an old fashioned still in this regard but these are the moment where I really can be creative, if I am, to be left alone with just a book and piece of paper and to be thinking.

You could be brilliant, but if you don’t put in the energy, the output is zero.

But I had decided that science is really the thing…It is what I wanted. Exactly.

But look at what we can do at a place like Caltech, with scientists from the Middle East to Europe to Asia to America.

The great singer Um Kulthum (actually named Kawkab Elsharq – a superstar of the East) had a major influence on my appreciation of music. On the first Thursday of each month we listened to Um Kulthum's concert – "waslats" (three songs) – for more than three hours. During all of my study years in Egypt, the music of this unique figure gave me a special happiness, and her voice was often in the background while I was studying mathematics, chemistry… etc. After three decades I still have the same feeling and passion for her music.