"I used to believe, like many people who come from poor backgrounds, that it gave me an edge, but I think that's just something we have to tell ourselves to get by sometimes. I don't believe that anymore. Children of privilege can be just as talented and clever as anybody else."

"I aim to please. I'm nothing if not a vaudevillian."

"They were singing, Gillette, the best a man can get, with a lot of guys hugging their fathers and sailing and riding bikes. I suddenly felt a long way from the best a man could get and I thought it would be nice to get from there to the best."

"I've started looking at my own father a bit funny. He assures me, though, that I really am the son of a Scottish postman."

"The harmony of the universe dictates that the true master is an eternal student."

"The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do."

"It's such a diversion to be constantly thinking of better ways I can teach people math that my hunger is for that really, for new ways of translating the beauty of it."

"It is a essential truth that the universe speaks in the silent dialect of universal natural laws."