I believe that I had something called epigenetic imprinting, which I actually read about in a book called The Female Brain by Louann Brizendine. Not to self-promote too much, but I loved it so much I wrote a movie with a brilliant comedian named Neil Brennan and made the move this year. That’s how profoundly it changed my life, because I believe that the more we know about our neural brain wiring, the more freedom we have and the more patience we have with ourselves.

In history I decided to begin with Gibbon. Someone had told me that my father had read Gibbon with delight; that he knew whole pages of it by heart, and that it had greatly affected his style of speech and writing. So without more ado I set out upon the eight volumes of Dean Milman's edition of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire . I was immediately dominated both by the story and the style. All through the long glistening middle hours of the Indian day, from when we quitted stables till the evening shadows proclaimed the hour of Polo, I devoured Gibbon. I rode triumphantly through it from end to end and enjoyed it all.

It was probably a series of biographies of scientists like Pasteur, or even earlier ones — Leeuwenhoek inventing the microscope and Madame Curie. I forget how many others, but it was really just, for me, a fascination to learn about these great heroes. At that time, of course, they were totally inaccessible, almost non-human, to me. It became very interesting to me.

the thesis in the book is that computers need to understand human emotions just the way people do. I read the book and I was just fascinated by this idea. I made that my research topic and it became my obsession and it just really changed the trajectory of my life.

I have a lot of respect and admiration for President Carter. It was a delight when I got the Nobel Peace Prize to get a letter from him. It meant a lot to me, getting that letter from a man who is my idol in many ways. ... He always has the courage to express his views, his convictions. He doesn’t hesitate to run against the current. He has always had a moral certitude. He looks at the ethics and morality of his action, and that’s key. Whatever we do in life, whether privately or publicly, we need to have a compass. We need to be sure that what we do is not only good for us, but good for the people at large. That’s ethics. That’s morality. I think we need to always know that our work is not just good for us in the short term, but it’s morally correct. And when I talk about morality, I don’t talk about religion. I talk about a moral code, a moral value, which I think we all have, being honest, being fair, being correct. These are values I think we all share.

Unfortunately, I don’t. My wife now reads fiction. I don’t have the time to read fiction. My wife reads the fiction and summarizes it to me, but I wish at one point I’ll have time again to read fiction. It is a luxury I cannot afford right now.

Well, I think the most single important issue today is to make sure that nuclear weapons will not proliferate beyond the eight, or nine, countries that already have nuclear weapons; and absolutely make sure that none of these nuclear weapons or this nuclear material will fall into the hands of any extremist or terrorist group, because if they got hold of this material, they would use it. That would be the beginning of the end for civilisation as we know it.

One of my mentors, Tom Frank, a professor of law at NYU, he was really instrumental in making me understand that we need to look at the global picture, and we always need to not take anything for granted, but go very much through a process of critical thinking before we formulate our views. So he was, I think, instrumental in shaping my views as to how to pursue my career in the future.

My sister-in-law and I are working towards the same goal, through different paths: the security of the human family.

For them, home is the world. For them, every human being is just one member of that large human family you have. ... if we have more children like mine, in my view, we will not have war.