Stephen Hawking

We lived in a tall, narrow Victorian house, which my parents had bought very cheaply during the war, when everyone thought London was going to be bombed flat. In fact, a V-2 rocket landed a few houses away from ours. I was away with my mother and sister at the time, but my father was in the house.

If we want to travel into the future, we just need to go fast. Really fast. And I think the only way we're ever likely to do that is by going into space.

I don't care much for equations myself. This is partly because it is difficult for me to write them down, but mainly because I don't have an intuitive feeling for equations.

There are plenty of dead scientists I admire, but I can't think of any living ones. This is probably because it is only in retrospect that one can see who made the important contributions.

Many badly needed goals, like fusion and cancer cure, would be achieved much sooner if we invested more.

Some people would claim that things like love, joy and beauty belong to a different category from science and can't be described in scientific terms, but I think they can now be explained by the theory of evolution.

I believe there are no questions that science can't answer about a physical universe.

I have found far greater enthusiasm for science in America than here in Britain. There is more enthusiasm for everything in America.

I want my books sold on airport bookstalls.

I was never top of the class at school, but my classmates must have seen potential in me, because my nickname was 'Einstein.'

As a child, I wanted to know how things worked and to control them. With a friend, I built a number of complicated models that I could control.

Some forms of motor neuron disease are genetically linked, but I have no indication that my kind is. No other member of my family has had it. But I would be in favour of abortion if there was a high risk.

Exploration by real people inspires us.

I entered the health care debate in response to a statement in the United States press in summer 2009 which claimed the National Health Service in Great Britain would have killed me off, were I a British citizen. I felt compelled to make a statement to explain the error.

I had not expected 'A Brief History of Time' to be a best seller.

Perhaps one day I will go into space.

It's a pity that nobody has found an exploding black hole. If they had, I would have won a Nobel prize.

The cyclic universe theory predicts no gravitational waves from the early universe.

We must develop as quickly as possible technologies that make possible a direct connection between brain and computer, so that artificial brains contribute to human intelligence rather than opposing it.

Computers double their performance every month.