“There is a saying that every nice piece of work needs the right person in the right place at the right time.”

A cloud is made of billows upon billows upon billows that look like clouds. As you come closer to a cloud you don’t get something smooth, but irregularities at a smaller scale.

For the moment, what we attend to is reality.

Both chaos theory and fractal have had contacts in the past when they are both impossible to develop and in a certain sense not ready to be developed.

I had many books and I had dreams of all kinds. Dreams in which were in a certain sense, how to say, easy to make because the near future was always extremely threatening.

Humanity has known for a long time what fractals are. It is a very strange situation in which an idea which each time I look at all documents have deeper and deeper roots, never (how to say it), jelled.

In fact, I barely missed being number one in France in both schools. In particular I did very well in mathematical problems.

Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dustcloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to.

I was in an industrial laboratory because academia found me unsuitable

The beauty of what I happened by extraordinary chance to put together is that nobody would have believed that this is possible, and certainly I didn’t expect that it was possible. I just moved from step to step to step.

Unfortunately, the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians.

One couldn’t even measure roughness. So, by luck, and by reward for persistence, I did found the theory of roughness, which certainly I didn’t expect and expecting to found one would have been pure madness.

There are very complex shapes which would be the same from close by and far away.

If one takes the kinds of risks which I took, which are colossal, but taking risks, I was rewarded by being able to contribute in a very substantial fashion to a variety of fields. I was able to reawaken and solve some very old problems.

Beautiful, damn hard, increasingly useful. That’s fractals.

It was astonishing when at one point, I got the idea of how to make artifical clouds with a collaborator, we had pictures made which were theoretically completely artificial pictures based upon that one very simple idea. And this picture everybody views as being clouds.

The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market

The entire world economy rests on the consumer; if he ever stops spending money he doesn’t have on things he doesn’t need — we’re done for.

Without arts programmes there’s only reality TV, and reality TV needs the arts to show it what reality is.

I think we need to go straight at the fossil fuel industry.

You look at the states [Barack] Obama won and wonder, well, where would Hillary Clinton have a problem and where does Donald Trump have problems?

A woman who has style doesn’t necessarily need designers – designer wear. A woman who has style can put on any frock or dress or pant or whatever and still bring something to it.

What we need is a gigantic, messy community conversation about what is teaching and learning for the 21st century. We need to engage communities.

We need to be willing to stand up and speak up for what we believe.

But she needs me more than she needs him and I guess being needed is almost as good as being loved. Maybe better.