I would always be tempted to take a movie I liked less if the payday was twice as much, and I’ve interviewed a couple people that grew up with wealth and I’ve watched them navigate their career and I’ve been envious of it. Nick Kroll comes to mind. He has so much creative integrity. He just does what fascinates him.

I’m envious of people who don’t need that. There are people that just wander round the world and ideas fall down from wherever, and they sit and they strum a guitar one day and they write a song, and then they carry on living. I could never work in that way.

I felt at the time that Eric was much more successful than I, he was extremely productive during his time in Zurich, and worked on many very original projects, germ line, cell lineage, sex determination, where not many people could follow him. I also had the impression that I was dependent on him because he had more fly experience and without him I would not have gotten the job. This made our start in Heidelberg a little difficult, until we sorted things out, and from then on we thoroughly enjoyed working in the same lab.

I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, "How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?" He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, "You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years." I simply slunk out of the office!