I was very well organized in my things. I am an exceptional worker, not only a risk taker. And I was not in competition with anybody. Many people died because they were in competition.

You see, researchers have coined this term "color blindness" to describe a learned behavior where we pretend that we don't notice race. If you happen to be surrounded by a bunch of people who look like you, that's purely accidental. Now, color blindness, in my view, doesn't mean that there's no racial discrimination, and there's fairness. It doesn't mean that at all. It doesn't ensure it. In my view, color blindness is very dangerous because it means we're ignoring the problem.

The next generation of telescopes will see millions of events per night with computers that sift through huge amounts of data. If we had had access to a computer, we would never have programmed it to look for something so unexpected. How do you pick up the things you don't know exist, the things you can't tell it to look for? My project was to study quasars, and then we accidentally stumble over these things called pulsars. They were totally unexpected, totally unknown – and it's been huge fun.

Well, what's very interesting is that those people read our opinions which can be, at moments, rather animated. An animated exchange in writing among the justices. And many people who read our opinions think we have to be at each other's necks constantly. It's interesting we're not. When we're talking about cases at our conference it's generally a conversation. It's really a talk about what our perspectives are and why we have reached the conclusions we've reached.

I wish that I could be around 15 years from now, 100 years ... .

I fell in love with the stories by William Beebe, who was an ocean explorer. He discussed what it was like to go down inside a submersible, and peer out of a port hole and see beautiful, luminescent fish, with lights down the side like ocean liners. Bizarre creatures of the sort that you just don’t see walking down the street, or going into the forest, or even looking around in shallow water.

They encouraged me, the way I do others now, that if you really have something that you like to do, that’s what you probably should do. Despite what everybody says, that you can’t make a living, or that’s not practical, or a thousand reasons why you may not do this or this or this. If that’s what your heart says you should do, chances are that you ought to listen.