As for me prizes are nothing. My prize is my work.

When women kiss it always reminds one of prize fighters shaking hands.

This ceremony and the intellectual aura associated with the Nobel Prizes have grown from the wisdom of a practical chemist who wrote a remarkable will.

What we want to do is reform the welfare system in the way that Tony Blair talked about 13 years ago but never achieved - a system that was created for the days after the Second World War. That prize is now I think achievable.

In war there is no prize for runner-up.

Do not trust your memory it is a net full of holes the most beautiful prizes slip through it.

We won a contest at the teen fair in Vancouver and the first prize was a recording contract and we recorded at a radio station on the stairway and we did a record and it got put out.

That work led to the emergence of the recombinant DNA technology thereby providing a major tool for analyzing mammalian gene structure and function and formed the basis for me receiving the 1980 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Please stop teaching my children that everyone gets a trophy just for participating. What is this the Nobel Prize? Not everybody gets a trophy.

Anyone could be in the orchestra or sports team or arts club at my school. It was precisely the kind of inclusivity that now meets with a sort of scorn and derision as a prizes-for-all culture that generates only mediocrity. There's something so insulting about the idea that including lots of people means mediocrity.