A writer is no different than a bricklayer or a bus driver in that sense. You must have discipline. Oscar Wilde said that writing is 10 percent genius, 90 percent discipline. You must have discipline for writing. It is not an easy task. It is very lonely. You’re all alone. You are not in company. You are not enjoying yourself in that sense. You are enjoying yourself in another sense. You are delving into your depths, but you are profoundly lonely. It is one of the loneliest careers in the world. In the theater, you are with companions, with directors, actors. In film. In an office. In writing, you are alone. That takes a lot of strength and a lot of will to do it. You must really be in love with what you’re doing to tolerate the huge loneliness of writing.

So I got this new attitude.  Now that I am burned out and I’ll never accomplish anything, I’ve got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.

I was curious. Curiosity is a good thing. And I was curious about different people. And, as I said, I waited until something was strong enough to disturb me or inspire me to make a film.

I really love structure and I think that one of the things I like so much about the theater is the routine. I’m looking forward to this play I’m going to do in London with Daniel Radcliffe, and just the idea that I’ll go to work at the same time every night and I know what I’ll be doing for the next few months. That’s so pleasing to me. I think everyone needs routine and structure in your life.

There's only one thing where I… if I had the opportunity to live my life over again where I probably would make a change.…I think if I had shortened that period and had earlier begun to work on basic evolutionary theory on history of biology and particularly on the philosophy of biology, I could have achieved some things which now I will never be able to achieve because at age 93, one knows that one doesn't live forever.

My father had a wonderful library, and we always bought books galore, and I devoured all the books of explorers that went to various places in the world. I admired what Humboldt had done and Bates and Darwin and the Swedish explorers, Sven Hedin and others. I was dreaming all the time about someday being an explorer, going to the tropics, going to the jungles, seeing new things, discovering strange animals and so forth, but of course it was a dream world.

And I still remember, and that's the honest truth, as we were leaving his office, he said, 'Well, I give you a fifty-fifty chance to come out alive'. That was Malaita at that time, and... and you can check in the books and will find that that was the... that's why nobody had ever collected there. Well, we made the first collection.

No sir. I'm rather dismayed how many days I have to work on my willpower very strongly in order to get out of bed before 8 o'clock.…I write letters, I write manuscripts, in addition to the book that is in press I have two manuscripts that are going to be published some time this or next year, and I have a whole list of manuscripts that I would like to write.

Well, you know, the genotype. I'll mention something that nobody ever mentions. Let's say you have now a genotype that makes a certain protein. And that protein, and you can see this in every issue of Science practically, that protein is a very complex structure, incredibly complex. Now how that step from a group of amino acids to that polypeptide [happens] is an enormous jump. I think right now everybody leaves it alone because nobody yet has figured out just exactly how to attack this problem.

One of the answers is that very often I see a statement made by somebody which clearly to me is wrong, and then I work out what is the real right answer, and this happens to me very often.