"When I was a kid, I wanted to be Elvis. I wanted to be Michael. I wanted to be all those guys put together."

Mathematics is not a deductive science—that's a cliché. When you try to prove a theorem, you don't just list the hypotheses and then start to reason. What you do is trial and error, experimentation, guesswork.

On the path of science, failure is the norm, but each failure brings us closer to success.