The extraordinary delegation of authority now existing at Berkshire is the ideal antidote to bureaucracy. In an operating sense, Berkshire is not a giant company but rather a collection of large companies. At headquarters, we have never had a committee nor have we ever required our subsidiaries to submit budgets (though many use them as an important internal tool). We don't have a legal office nor departments that other companies take for granted: human relations, public relations, investor relations, strategy, acquisitions, you name it. We do, of course, have an active audit function; no sense being a damned fool.

And I acted when the actors didn’t show up. As the director, I knew all the lines and I took over more times than I wanted to. I didn’t know much about directing, but I was the only one willing to do it. Someone had looked around and said, “Who’s going to be the director?” I said, “I will.” I said that because I knew my way around the library. So I went to look for a book on how to direct a play. I found one called The Fundamentals of Play Directing and checked it out. I didn’t understand anything in it. It was all about form and mass and balance. I flipped through the book and there in Appendix A I discovered what to do on the first day of rehearsal. It said, “Read the play.” So I went to the first rehearsal very confidently and I said, “Okay, this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to read the play.” We did that. Now what? I hadn’t got to Appendix B. So I said, “Let’s read the play again.” That night I went back to the book and sort of figured out what to do from that point on.

For me, making architecture is the same as thinking. For more than thirty years, I have been making architecture by going back and forth between ideals and reality, between the fictive and the substantive. My hope has been and continues to be, not only to solve realistic problems, but also to pursue the ideal by overlaying speculative imaginings.

To get the most out of the world around you you’ve got to really look hard. Most people out walking in the woods don’t really look. They just glance around. They scan. Before I start a painting I spend a lot of time looking and thinking, I go out in the car and pull a chair out of the boot and sit in the woods. I sit there and smoke and just look.

Yes, in 2018, I was awarded the Breakthrough Prize for the discovery. I was a bit dumbstruck, never expecting that kind of thing to happen. I was keen that the money should be used well and the best way to do that seemed to be to encourage a more diverse research student population from under-represented groups.

They have a lot of extreme physics going on inside them and scientists use them to test theories of relativity on a cosmic scale. Einstein’s theories are checking out pretty well so far.

Occasionally there would be something I didn’t recognise and I’d record it with a question mark or, as a joke, LGM for Little Green Men. It was easier than saying “you know that funny pulsing source at right ascension 1919, declination plus 20”. So, it became LGM.

I was really proud that it was my stars that had convinced the prize committee that there was good physics in astrophysics.

The next generation of telescopes will see millions of events per night with computers that sift through huge amounts of data. If we had had access to a computer, we would never have programmed it to look for something so unexpected. How do you pick up the things you don't know exist, the things you can't tell it to look for? My project was to study quasars, and then we accidentally stumble over these things called pulsars. They were totally unexpected, totally unknown – and it's been huge fun.

My contemporaries were more upset about the Nobel than I was not to be recognised. One of them labelled it the 'No-Bell' prize! But it was fine by me. There's no Nobel Prize in astronomy and I was really proud that it was my stars that had convinced the prize committee that there was good physics in astrophysics.