to isolate and to force myself to write

No, never. Strangely enough, being such a tomboy, and being so—as my mother says—spoiled as a child, once I started dancing and in a way growing up, I was not the spoiled brat or the rebellious child that I was when I really had no reason to be as a child. When you work, it’s a laboratory. The dance studio, when we were working together, was the place where you experiment. I’m not intimidated by failure or making a mistake, because you learn from those situations. You don’t learn from a situation where you do something well. You enjoy it and you give yourself credit, but you don’t really learn from that. You learn from trial and error, trial and error, all the time. When you fail, maybe you failed in that particular instance, but you have discovered something else. A lot of the ballets that we went on to do were built around mistakes that we had made in the classroom. So you never throw anything out. Rebelling takes up energy. As a dancer, you don’t have that kind of energy to throw away.

People tell me that I work hard. I never feel that I do particularly, because it’s fun. I always say, “Well, I’ve never worked hard in my life.” I’m busy, but most of what I do is enjoyable. It isn’t that it’s not tedious to some people, and so on, and of course I have routine to do, but I don’t mind it. I just don’t feel that I’m put upon. I spend a lot of time, but it’s fun. It’s a very intensive hobby. I would say it’s my most serious hobby. I have lots of hobbies, but the one permanent one is science, physics. So yes, I spend a lot of time, and I would agree with Edison, you have to work very hard and intensively.

I know what I’m doing when I’m doing it but I almost don’t know what I’m doing when I’m doing it.

Primarily to show, and you will think that this doesn't need showing, but lots of people would disagree with you. To show that biology is an autonomous science and should not be mixed up with physics. That's my message.

My mentor was Professor Erwin Stresemann, who was at that time clearly the world's leading ornithologist, a man who was not only highly intelligent, but very hard working; he edited two journals, he wrote a big textbook, he supervised students, he sent out expeditions.

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.

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.

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.

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.