I would like to write a play which doesn’t disappoint me 20 years later.

I think a lot of that first wave of entrepreneurship was missing the product of localization, and they weren't really asking the question, "What are the big, impactful products or problems that we got to solve locally, and forget about the U.S. or forget about Europe?"

We still don’t understand the way a protein folds the way it does. I mean it’s an amazing thing.

I sometimes I have the inability to see how I can do what I need to do at a high enough level for me to do it.

Unfortunately I have too many projects going. Two of them, fortunately, are already in the editors’ hands. One is this book on the birds of Northern Melanesia I’m doing with Jared Diamond, and that deals with speciation and particular ecology, biogeographic dispersal and all the other questions.

I always think about things, and if something puzzles me… Well, that of course was one of Darwin’s secrets. Whenever something puzzled him, he tried find a theory. He made a conjecture, as (Karl) Popper would call it, and see if it worked out and that’s true even today.

Birds are still very much my hobby

Now look here, young man. If you become a medical doctor you will never have a chance to go to the tropics, you will be far too busy.

Primarily to show, and you will think that this doesn't need showing, but lots of people would disagree with you. To show that biology is an autonomous science and should not be mixed up with physics. That's my message.

Professor [Bernhard] Rensch influenced me a great deal because I talked with him about these matters and in his book he raised all the problems that would... or at least most of the problems that would occupy my mind in the later years.