My answer may have surprised some in attendance at the meeting: I don’t have a role model or sensei. Or to be more precise, I don’t have a single teacher. Instead, I take it upon myself to learn from everyone around me. If we open our eyes, we may find that everyone can be our teacher.

I’m in a transition, Hans. I am painting, and I am painting over and then painting, and then painting over, and destroying, and painting, and destroying, and painting over. I am just trying to find the next thing, and the only way I think I can find it is to keep doing things and learning from it.

And I realized that to get them I had to figure out how to study. And I did something that has helped me my entire life, and it’s something I still do, which is when I don’t know how to do something now I start reading about it. Back then I would ask people for help.

I still regularly read New Scientist to try to keep up with quantum theory and cosmological discoveries and so forth. And I read National Geographic—that’s not a plug.

I didn’t realise I’m the oldest ever! So I just about made it, huh? Because you can’t be dead and win … If you’re a winner of the National Inventors Hall of Fame you can be dead. I won that prize a couple of years ago and I was very proud of that. That is the most, I would say, most important prize I’ve won.

I was very shy, but I knew that this lady was special,…So I had enough nerve to ask for her phone number.

I want to take Aline to a good restaurant, and we'll have a good meal,

Wonder Why would say, 'Why is the sky blue?'…Then Wonder Why would tell you. I was fascinated, because I wanted to know how things worked ... that was my introduction to science.

I can be cranky,

I invented optical levitation.