Yes, that’s right. I saw what I could succeed in. I never considered myself very bright, and I always thought of myself as mathematically mediocre. So I figured that probably, like your college runner who has difficulty breaking a ten-second hundred — well, breaking an 11-second, shall we say, 100-meter — realizes that their best shot is to rely less on strength and speed and more on self-discipline, planning, and long hard work. Yes. That’s the way I do science.

People tell me that I work hard. I never feel that I do particularly, because it’s fun. I always say, “Well, I’ve never worked hard in my life.” I’m busy, but most of what I do is enjoyable. It isn’t that it’s not tedious to some people, and so on, and of course I have routine to do, but I don’t mind it. I just don’t feel that I’m put upon. I spend a lot of time, but it’s fun. It’s a very intensive hobby. I would say it’s my most serious hobby. I have lots of hobbies, but the one permanent one is science, physics. So yes, I spend a lot of time, and I would agree with Edison, you have to work very hard and intensively.

The bitterness. I am very sad if I think of the status of the world now. This is my deepest inspiration. This could be also an inspiration for the next generation or generations in literature. Inspiration to give something for the next generation, somehow to survive this time because these are very, very dark times and we need much more power in us to survive this time than before.

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.

We'd walk in the canyons, and we'd often walk with Bethe, and Von Neumann, and Bacher. It was a great pleasure.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

Nothing happens because there’s not enough real activity and challenge: You’re not in contact with the experimental guys.  You don’t have to think how to answer questions from the students.  Nothing!

So I wish to you—I have no more time, so I have just one wish for you—the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom. May I also give you one last bit of advice: Never say that you'll give a talk unless you know clearly what you're going to talk about and more or less what you're going to say.

I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate.  I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate—two to one.  It came out of a complicated equation!  Then I thought, “Is there some way I can see in a more fundamental way, by looking at the forces or the dynamics, why it’s two to one?”

There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was.  The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.