I don’t regret having done it at all. I think everything that I went through was worth it. I am very proud. But I would not do it again.

I’m the most proud when I get something from cities, or people. At first I was against awards, you know. I would always say, “This is so fake. The people who vote on this stuff, they never listen to the music.” But for me it’s when I received awards or something from the city. Just to go to somebody’s house and eat. Or people come and say, “We spent our anniversary checking you out,” or “We were making love to one of your records, and we had a child!” See that kind of stuff makes me feel good. Like you get a key to the city and the people are really into it. Not just, “Oh, let’s give him the key to the city because he got some publicity.” It will be some people you knew, and you were there at their school, and you worked in the community.

A man does not get to write his own epitaph. But if I were to write mine it would say the following: He loved his family, and he loved his troops, and they loved him — period.

I really love the medals but what I’m proud of most, absolutely most, is that now young girls have perspective, young girls can play football and young girls can wear shirts [with players’ names on],

I can’t remember that anyone in particular did. I think perhaps it was my mother who influenced me the most. She was a housewife. She had no higher education, but had the most common sense of anyone I knew, and she wanted me to have a career. So she was always very supportive, at a time when many women of her generation would not have been.

It was a very important finding for us because we were involved in nucleic acids. There weren’t many people interested in nucleic acids. There weren’t many people who believed that was the way to find drugs. But when we found out the structure, and we began to understand what kind of bases could be incorporated, and which ones couldn’t, and where they could be incorporated, it put a whole new dimension on it. So it had a very significant effect.