The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it – aliens.

Many sophisticated, intelligent people lack wisdom and common sense.

Such as we are made of, such we be.

My son’s full real name is Duncan Zowie Haywood. As a toddler, he was called by his second name Zowie. But it was such an identifiable name during the Seventies that if I called him loudly in public places, everyone would turn to stare, so I started calling him Joey to take the pressure off.

Our existence is beyond our explanation, whether we believe in God or we have religion or we’re atheist. Our existence is beyond our understanding. No one has an answer.

Nobody has ever convinced me that race is real.

You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m as famous for my wheelchair and disabilities as I am for my discoveries.

Everybody always laughs because I feel so much more comfortable with, like, a giant paper bag on my whole body and paint on my face. Sometimes I try really hard to take it all off. But inevitably what’s underneath is still not a straight edge. And I don’t think it ever will be.

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.

Go on, prove me wrong. Destroy the fabric of the universe. See if I care.

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.

I first had the idea of writing a popular book about the universe in 1982. My intention was partly to earn money to pay my daughter’s school fees.

Our constitution protects aliens, drunks and U.S. Senators.

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one’s never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

There are some people who need to wear a label round their necks to show that they are Christians at all, or else we might mistake them for sinners, their actions are so like those of the ungodly.

For years, my early work with Roger Penrose seemed to be a disaster for science. It showed that the universe must have begun with a singularity, if Einstein’s general theory of relativity is correct. That appeared to indicate that science could not predict how the universe would begin.

The more people smoke herb, the more Babylon fall.

It is clear to everyone that astronomy at all events compels the soul to look upwards, and draws it from the things of this world to the other.

In other words, a person who is fanatic in matters of religion, and clings to certain ideas about the nature of God and the universe, becomes a person who has no faith at all.

I have thought a sufficient measure of civilization is the influence of good women.

I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.

The ultimate connection is when you are connected to the creator of the universe.

I wear the national dress because it is the most natural and the most becoming for an Indian.

I’ve come to the conclusion that mythology is really a form of archaeological psychology. Mythology gives you a sense of what a people believes, what they fear.

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?

There are plenty of people who are, I think, completely racist who love hip-hop.

The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.

If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.

The people of Egypt are an intelligent people with a glorious history who left their mark on civilization.

Acting is a nice childish profession – pretending you’re someone else and, at the same time, selling yourself.

I am a nuclear physicist by training and a deeply committed Christian. I don’t have any doubt in my own mind about God who created the entire universe. But I don’t adhere to passages that so and so was created 4,000 years before Christ, and things of that kind.

When humor goes, there goes civilization.

The person we believe ourselves to be will always act in a manner consistent with our self-image.

The centre of the system of the world is immovable.

If we do discover a complete theory, it should be in time understandable in broad principle by everyone. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people be able to take part in the discussion of why we and the universe exist.

When people get taken over by the ego to such an extent, there is nothing else in their mind except the ego. They can no longer feel or sense their humanity – what they share with other human beings, or even with other life forms on the planet. They are so identified with concepts in their minds that other human beings become concepts as well.

My connection with Brazil is so abstract. My blood and my way of thinking is Brazilian, but that’s it. I don’t tend to go back to the past, and although I have an apartment there, I rarely visit. When I move, I really move.

There is nothing bigger or older than the universe.

A nation’s culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people.

Working out another system to replace Newton’s laws took a long time because phenomena at the atomic level were quite strange. One had to lose one’s common sense in order to perceive what was happening at the atomic level.

Today different ethnic groups and different nations come together due to common sense.

People – especially white people – they want me to be a role model just because of the life I lead. The things I say in my songs, they expect it of me.

I really do feel part of America to my very bones; at the same time, I know that I come from somewhere else.

Young love is wild and outrageous, laughing at moderation and blinding us to common sense.

Myths which are believed in tend to become true.

Love is an adventure and a conquest. It survives and develops, like the universe itself, only by perpetual discovery.

What is common sense isn’t common practice.

If your culture doesn’t like geeks, you are in real trouble.

I just like to have words that describe things correctly. Now to me, ‚black feminist‘ does not do that. I need a word that is organic, that really comes out of the culture, that really expresses the spirit that we see in black women. And it’s just… womanish.

In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion-, and even nation-centred cultures.

I think it’s important as an artist to never forget where you’re from.

Coffee is a language in itself.

Culture is the process by which a person becomes all that they were created capable of being.

I believe everyone should have a broad picture of how the universe operates and our place in it. It is a basic human desire. And it also puts our worries in perspective.

Just as the humble, unassuming, assenting ‚O.K.‘ has deposed the more affirmative ‚Yes,‘ so the little cringe and hesitation and approximation of ‚like‘ are a help to young people who are struggling to negotiate the shoals and rapids of ethnic identity, the street, and general correctness.

If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?

I don’t see myself as a pop artist. Like, when you hear ‚pop,‘ you’re like, ‚Oh, bubblegum, jumpy little girly stuff,‘ and I feel like, ‚Uh-uh. That’s not me.‘

The arts don’t exist in isolation.

For people who may think they know, or have snippets of who I am, you can attack that person. That’s part of being a public figure.