I realized that I would have some very tough sledding, and I was very discouraged because I didn’t see much hope of getting into the field I wanted to get into with no college education.

How does a pansy, for example, select the ingredients from soil to get the right colors for the flower? Now there’s a great miracle. I think there’s a supreme power behind all of this. I see it in nature.

A person that much interested in science is going to neglect his social life somewhat, but not completely, because that isn’t healthy either. So one has to work it out according to one’s own inclinations, how one wants to proportion these things.

I used to think about how nice it would be to visit the planets. Of course, I didn’t expect to see in my lifetime what has happened. I knew it would happen some day, but it came along faster than I at first thought.

I used to believe there were people on Mars, and of course now we know there aren’t. Mars held particular interest. I was curious what kind of beings they would look like.

You have to compete with others in the field. Sometimes the competition gets pretty fierce because you’re competing for funds or grants to do your work, the financial work.

The planets are never the same twice, they’re always different, so they could compare the markings I had drawn with their current photographs and they knew that I was drawing what I was really seeing and it wasn’t copied from somewhere.

Unfortunately, a lot of the concepts in the Bible are based on ancient mythology that doesn’t fit the findings of science.

I think the driving thing was curiosity about the universe. That fascinated me. I didn’t think anything about being famous or anything like that, I was just interested in the concepts involved.

That’s the way I got along in life. I don’t ever remember being particularly jealous of anybody, because I figured if I can’t do it myself, I don’t deserve to get it.