It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

While day by day the overzealous student stores up facts for future use he who has learned to trust nature finds need for ever fewer external directions. He will discard formula after formula until he reaches the conclusion: Let nature take its course.

I don't think I was funny until college. I lived with some Harvard MD/PhD students - they were so smart and what I contributed to the house was I was the funny one.

You are almost not free if you are teaching a group of graduate students to become friends with one of them. I don't mean anything erotically charged just a friendship.

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.

I tell my students it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see who's very far away who's a different color who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.

I had some of the students in my finance class actually do some empirical work on capital structures to see if we could find any obvious patterns in the data but we couldn't see any.

I was a great student at a great school Wharton School of Finance.

I'd gone from being this art student messing about with music to this girl with a record deal magazine front covers and all this hype. In many ways it was everything I ever wanted but when it happened all I felt was total paralysing fear.

Not a few other very eminent and scholarly men made the same request urging that I should no longer through fear refuse to give out my work for the common benefit of students of Mathematics.