Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
Verbatim recurring item in The Guardian Q&A; two fully readable publisher-hosted respondent pages establish institutional recurrence.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Academy of Achievement interview, 5 April 2001 source ↗
That I’ve never killed anyone – and I’ve been tempted numerous times. My other achievement is that I went to Australia, which meant I was on a plane without smoking for almost 24 hours, and I didn’t kill anyone on that flight.
My books. There’s no greater feeling than a disabled child coming up to me and saying, “I’ve never seen myself in a book before.”
Singing on the Berlin Wall to a million people in 1989.
"How to Live" feels like such a masterpiece for me that if I did nothing else with my whole life, but write that one book, it still feels like it would have been a life well lived.
No sir. I'm rather dismayed how many days I have to work on my willpower very strongly in order to get out of bed before 8 o'clock.…I write letters, I write manuscripts, in addition to the book that is in press I have two manuscripts that are going to be published some time this or next year, and I have a whole list of manuscripts that I would like to write.
I always think about things, and if something puzzles me… Well, that of course was one of Darwin’s secrets. Whenever something puzzled him, he tried find a theory. He made a conjecture, as (Karl) Popper would call it, and see if it worked out and that’s true even today.
One of the answers is that very often I see a statement made by somebody which clearly to me is wrong, and then I work out what is the real right answer, and this happens to me very often.
Now look here, young man. If you become a medical doctor you will never have a chance to go to the tropics, you will be far too busy.
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.
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.
Maggie Aderin-Pocock, Aaron Ciechanover, Arthur Ashkin, Richard Feynman, Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Jo Brand
Search the directory for somebody in particular.