No one is so completely disenchanted with the world or knows it so thoroughly or is so utterly disgusted with it that when it begins to smile upon him he does not become partially reconciled to it.

I don't remember ever deciding to become a performer. I just always was. I began performing by mimicking the performers on the new television that first took the attention away from me as the baby of the household. I continued performing to put a smile on my grandmother's face and always considered her when accepting or declining roles.

To smile at the jest which plants a thorn in another's breast is to become a principal in the mischief.

I think the reason people are dealing with science less well now than 50 years ago is that it has become so complicated.

Unfortunately Climate Science has become Political Science. It is tragic that some perhaps well-meaning but politically motivated scientists who should know better have whipped up a global frenzy about a phenomena which is statistically questionable at best.

What has become clear from the science is that we cannot burn all of the fossil fuels without creating a very different planet.

Music is not math. It's science. You keep mixing the stuff up until it blows up on you or it becomes this incredible potion.

A man ceases to be a beginner in any given science and becomes a master in that science when he has learned that he is going to be a beginner all his life.

But the imposition of morality onto science - where it does not belong - has become rampant in recent years.

Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history literature science anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance.

Science fiction has its own history its own legacy of what's been done what's been superseded what's so much part of the furniture it's practically part of the fabric now what's become no more than a joke... and so on. It's just plain foolish as well as comically arrogant to ignore all this to fail to do the most basic research.

Today's preoccupation with physical theories of everything takes a wrong turn from the purpose of science - to question all things relentlessly. Modern physics has become like Swift's kingdom of Laputa flying absurdly on an island above the earth and indifferent to what is beneath.

What I'm working on now - I'm back to fantasy although considering that it's me I'm turning it into a kind of science fantasy. It's a vampire story - but my vampires are biological vampires. They didn't become vampires because someone bit them they were born that way.

Unfortunately things are different in climate science because the arguments have become heavily politicised. To say that the dogmas are wrong has become politically incorrect.

Women tend to be more intuitive or to admit to being intuitive and maybe the hard science approach isn't so attractive. The way that science is taught is very cold. I would never have become a scientist if I had been taught like that.

If Christianity is not scientific and Science is not God then there is no invariable law and truth becomes an accident.

Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.

'Snow White' is an old fairy tale so obviously the idea of vanity and obsession with youth is long-standing. With today's science people have become crazy with trying to move their face around. It's bizarre.

Science has explained nothing the more we know the more fantastic the world becomes and the profounder the surrounding darkness.

It has become almost a cliche to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science and proudly claim incompetence in mathematics.

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today - but the core of science fiction its essence has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.

It's a sad moment really when parents first become a bit frightened of their children.

I would never have become music director of the Chicago Symphony which would have been an extremely sad loss.

What's sad is that there is an addictive quality to that to believing your own hype to allowing yourself to become validated by others and no longer by yourself. That's the danger of celebrity.