“I flip ahead in the textbook. There's an interesting chapter about acid rain. Nothing about sex. We aren't scheduled to learn about that until eleventh grade.”

From Sex to Superconsciousness
Context: Whenever I meet prostitutes, they never speak of sex. They inquire about the soul, and about God. I also meet many ascetics and monks, and whenever we are alone they ask about nothing but sex. I was surprised to learn that ascetics, who are always preaching against sex, seem to be captivated by it. They are curious about it and disturbed by it; they have this mental complex about it, yet they sermonize about religion and about the animal instincts in man. And sex is so natural.

Interview with the 1988 Nobel Laureate in Physics, Jack Steinberger, at the 58th Meeting of Nobel Laureates in Lindau, Germany, July 2008.
Context: The pretention that some of us are better than others, I don't think is a very good thing. And who is contributing what to our progress in science is not so obvious and many who don't get that Nobel Prize are better than people than some of us that do get the Nobel Prize. … I think we should not be interested in prizes, we should be interested in learning about nature.

As quoted in The International Herald Tribune (24 January 1992)

"Bram Cohen: Creator of BitTorrent" http://wrongplanet.net/modules.php?name=Articles&pa=showpage&pid=98, WrongPlanet.net, undated; accessed March 9, 2006, 17:01 (UTC)

The Paris Review interview (2010)
Context: My passions drive me to the typewriter every day of my life, and they have driven me there since I was twelve. So I never have to worry about schedules. Some new thing is always exploding in me, and it schedules me, I don’t schedule it. It says: Get to the typewriter right now and finish this.

Source: Ceremonial Chemistry (1974), p. 11.