I think fiction is very important because it gets us into the mind of a person. Hamlet is a tremendous piece of literature. You know Hamlet better than you know most real people. Do you know the reason? Because you know what he’s thinking. And this teaches you that every human has an integrity and an autonomy and a spirituality of his own, of her own, and great literature can teach you that.

I remember reading The Making of a Surgeon when I was in probably about the sixth or seventh grade. And that was a book that kind of got me focused, I think, on the career path. And I remember, one thing in there I still remember is that you can always tell you’ve really arrived as a surgeon when the nurses in the hospital ask you to be their physician.

As an adolescent, I read Raymond Williams, George Orwell and Simone de Beauvoir – a crash course in human decency.

I was 13 when this book came out in your country in 1981, and I fell in love with it. It’s one of the books that made me love puzzles.

Unfortunately I have too many projects going. Two of them, fortunately, are already in the editors’ hands. One is this book on the birds of Northern Melanesia I’m doing with Jared Diamond, and that deals with speciation and particular ecology, biogeographic dispersal and all the other questions.

What in a way pleases me and makes me very proud, and I probably shouldn't be, is that I am an honorary fellow of the five oldest academies of the world, all five of them and I don't know whether there's anybody else who can say that.

Anyhow, I talked it over with my mother, and she said, “Well, if that’s what you want, go right ahead.” She was a wonderful woman. And so I did.

Well, you know, the genotype. I'll mention something that nobody ever mentions. Let's say you have now a genotype that makes a certain protein. And that protein, and you can see this in every issue of Science practically, that protein is a very complex structure, incredibly complex. Now how that step from a group of amino acids to that polypeptide [happens] is an enormous jump. I think right now everybody leaves it alone because nobody yet has figured out just exactly how to attack this problem.

Very often I had to fight for the recognition of my ideas, particularly since, in those earlier days, I wasn’t in any prominent position where people would listen to me.

There's only one thing where I… if I had the opportunity to live my life over again where I probably would make a change.…I think if I had shortened that period and had earlier begun to work on basic evolutionary theory on history of biology and particularly on the philosophy of biology, I could have achieved some things which now I will never be able to achieve because at age 93, one knows that one doesn't live forever.