Well, I'm proud of my gender. I think, you know, and I've said this to my Berkeley colleagues this morning, but my feeling is that I think among women and girls that, you know, sometimes there's a sense that no matter what they do that their work will not be recognised the way it would be if they were a man. And I just … I hope that this prize and this recognition changes that at least a little bit, and that it's encouraging to other women who are in science, or even in other fields, to realise that, you know, their work can be honoured and that their work can have a real impact.

In my opinion, the key to dealing with the future lies in knowing where you are, even if you can't know precisely where you're going. Knowing where you are in a cycle and what that implies for the future is very different from predicting the timing, extent and shape of the next cyclical move.

On the one hand, we have people that say the aid system is so broken we need to throw it out. And on the other we have people who say the problem is that we need more aid. ... Both sides are right. And the problem is that neither side is listening to the other. Even more problematic, they're not listening to poor people themselves.

The press and the public have created an image of Ed Hillary, hero and explorer which simply doesn’t exist. They’ve painted a picture of me as a heroic type, full of enormous courage, tremendous strength, undying enthusiasm and all the rest of it. But it’s all really just a story, that’s been written up in the newspapers. I’m a person, as I’ve said, of modest abilities, with a good deal of determination, and I do quite a lot of planning ahead. With careful planning and good motivation, I think you can often achieve things that other much more talented people would probably do much more easily.