I keep office hours. I work from 9:30 to 6:00. It’s curious. In the morning, I could just about tie my shoelaces before noon, but I can write. It’s obviously a different part of my brain that’s working.

I don’t remember which writer said this, but in an interview, a prolific novelist was asked, “Do you write only when you’re inspired, or do you write all the time? Do you wait for the muse, or do you just kind of knock it out? You can just sort of spin it out?” And he said, “Well, I do wait for the muse. I write when the muse comes, but fortunately she shows up, like me, every day at 9:00 a.m.

Well, I hate the word, but it’s true that something sometimes visits and other times doesn’t. I wish I felt otherwise, but I feel as though there has to be some catalyst, some inspiration. All of a sudden there’s a phrase in your head. Where does that thing come from? I don’t know, and because I don’t know, I don’t know how to have more of them.

It’s best to start writing when you wake up in the morning, or afternoon, or whenever it is you wake up. Just start then, because you are closer to the dream state than at any other time in the day, which means the imagination is really working on all cylinders, and it means that whatever it is that manufactures sentences in your head is very fresh, and you have all kinds of slants on things that by the end of the day you won’t have, or you will just lose along the way. Further advice I have not.

It is necessary, I believe, to accept this idea, not only for science, but also for other things; it is of great value to acknowledge ignorance.  It is a fact that when we make decisions in our life we don't necessarily know that we are making them correctly; we only think that we are doing the best we can – and that is what we should do.

I don’t believe I can really do without teaching.  The reason is, I have to have something so that when I don’t have any ideas and I’m not getting anywhere I can say to myself, “At least I’m living; at least I’m doing something; I’m making some contribution”—it’s just psychological.

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.

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.

It was a brilliant idea: You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish.  I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be.

So I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy solution for me where I don’t have to teach.  Never.