“Usually what is termed 'Inspiration' means the ingredients are garnered for you and you must concoct a suitable recipe.”

“Different ways of writing the same equation can suggest very different things, even if they are logically equivalent…. In Einstein's original 1905 paper, you do not find the equation E = mc2. What you find is m = E/c2…. the title of the paper is a question: "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on Its Energy Content?" …If we can explain mass in terms of energy, we'll be improving our description of the world. We'll need fewer ingrediants in our world-recipe.”

“To act, you must know pain. You must know what it means to be in love, what it means to be rejected.”

“Who or what inspires you?"
"I must admit that I often read my own articles in scientific journals and inspire myself.”

“Things usually work out in the end."
"What if they don't?"
"That just means you haven't come to the end yet.”

“[D]o not expect Americans to believe that freedom of speech is some disguised puppetry of the powerful. It is, to the contrary, an indispensable ingredient in the recipe for preventing tyrannies, be they of the left or right, be they in the name of the Fatherland, the Volk, or the workers. To say otherwise is merely to perform what Michael Polanyi called a “moral inversion”—an intellectual juggling act in which we are asked, in Orwellian terms, to regard freedom as slavery, discrimination as nondiscrimination, and truth as power.”

“If you haven’t the strength to impose your own terms upon life, then you must accept the terms it offers you.”

“I've described my usual writing process as scrambling from peak to peak on inspiration through foggy valleys of despised logic. Inspiration is better — when you can get it.”

“They say you are not you except in terms of relation to other people. If there weren't any other people there wouldn't be any you because what you do, which is what you are, only has meaning in relation to other people.”

“What we call inspiration in poetry is usually a visitation of words and rhythms rather than ideas.”