“I spent half my life, roughly speaking, doing the study of nature in many aspects and half of my life studying completely artificial shapes. And the two are extraordinarily close; in one way both are fractal.”

I didn’t feel comfortable at first with pure mathematics, or as a professor of pure mathematics. I wanted to do a little bit of everything and explore the world.

The Mandelbrot set is the most complex mathematical object known to mankind.

If you look at a shape like a straight line, what’s remarkable is that if you look at a straight line from close by, from far away, it is the same; it is a straight line.

Some mathematicians didn’t even perceive of the possibility of a picture being helpful. To the contrary, I went into an orgy of looking at pictures by the hundreds; the machines became a little bit better.

Now that I near 80, I realize with wistful pleasure that on many occasions I was 10, 20, 40, even 50 years ahead of my time.

Everything is roughness, except for the circles. How many circles are there in nature? Very, very few. The straight lines. Very shapes are very, very smooth. But geometry had laid them aside because they were too complicated.

A fractal is a way of seeing infinity.

The straight line has a property of self-similarity. Each piece of the straight line is the same as the whole line when used to a big or small extent.

Order doesn’t come by itself.

My life has been extremely complicated. Not by choice at the beginning at all, but later on, I had become used to complication and went on accepting things that other people would have found too difficult to accept.

Self-similarity is a dull subject because you are used to very familiar shapes. But that is not the case. Now many shapes which are self-similar again, the same seen from close by and far away, and which are far from being straight or plane or solid.

The theory of probability is the only mathematical tool available to help map the unknown and the uncontrollable. It is fortunate that this tool, while tricky, is extraordinarily powerful and convenient.

When people ask me what’s my field? I say, on one hand, a fractalist. Perhaps the only one, the only full-time one.

I didn’t want to become a pure mathematician, as a matter of fact, my uncle was one, so I knew what the pure mathematician was and I did not want to be a pure – I wanted to do something different.

The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines.

Being a language, mathematics may be used not only to inform but also, among other things, to seduce.

To have the Raiders global, and we’re not going to be able to do that with a half-filled stadium.

I spent 24 and a half years in prison

For me, being onstage for an hour and a half, my confidence was really huge for me. Doing eight shows a week for a run.

Sensuality, too, which used to show itself course, smiling, unmasked, and unmistakable, is now serious, analytic, and so burdened with a sense of its responsibilities that it passes muster half the time as a new type of asceticism.

My dad told me, ‘It takes fifteen years to be an overnight success’, and it took me seventeen and a half years.

The energy of live theater is indescribable. You are just in the moment for an hour and a half.

And when the other half get the idea it does no good to work because somebody’s going to get what I work for. That, dear friend, is about the end of any nation.

Finally, you will find that there is no half-measure when it comes to loving someone.