"To my knowledge significant progress has never been born of competition. … In science, being 'better' than others is of little practical value. Examples of how absurd the idea of scientific competition is are abundant."

“We live of novelty in science. So when you do something new, you have to overcome certain beliefs that it cannot be done, that it's not interesting and so on.”

“We had the freedom to make mistakes. That's something very important. Unfortunately, this freedom for scientists gets more and more lost. … Otherwise, you do the common things. You don't dare to do something beyond what everybody else thinks.”

“Young people are not yet biased in their mind. They are not completely taken by their expert opinions. Expert opinions have a difficulty to go beyond of what they know. When you start in a new field, from the point of view of a scientist, you certainly are 20 years younger, because in the new field you're not yet biased and you look at certain things a little bit more relaxed and a little bit more open.”

“I lost all respect for angstroms.”

“The coming nanometer age can, therefore, also be called the age of interdisciplinarity.”