Science is about curiosity-driven learning, and unless you are curious, you will never find science exciting.

I wanted to know. I asked a lot of questions and she would say, "Read, read."…So she inspired me a great deal.

The good part of aging is that you read more and more. You discover poets you never heard of when you were younger.

Knowledge is good for life. Life is what you play off for acting.

Professor [Bernhard] Rensch influenced me a great deal because I talked with him about these matters and in his book he raised all the problems that would... or at least most of the problems that would occupy my mind in the later years.

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.

Birds are still very much my hobby

And I still remember, and that's the honest truth, as we were leaving his office, he said, 'Well, I give you a fifty-fifty chance to come out alive'. That was Malaita at that time, and... and you can check in the books and will find that that was the... that's why nobody had ever collected there. Well, we made the first collection.

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.

The interests of a person plays a considerable role. For instance, people who are born naturalists should choose different professions than people who have a spectacular mathematical talent. I think it depends on a person’s talent, what he should choose and what he should love. If you don’t love what you’re doing, you’re not going to do a good job.