There are no heroes in most of my stories. I look at our society with a critical eye and find nothing extraordinary in the people I see.

Winning Nobel imposed on me a lifestyle to which I am not used and which I would not have preferred.

I believe society has a right to defend itself, just as the individual has the right to attack that with which he disagrees.

As the tension eases, we must look in the direction of agriculture, industry and education as our final goals, and toward democracy under Mr Mubarak.

My father was born and raised in Havana, Cuba. His family is from Spain. My father never taught me how to speak Spanish when I was little. That's very disappointing to me. I'm still planning on learning it on my own. I really want to travel to Spain and immerse myself in the culture and learn it on my own.

The best advice I ever got was that knowledge is power and to keep reading.

The formal education that I received made little sense to me.

There was an email forwarded to me from a first-grade teacher, and she said she was teaching them civil rights for MLK weekend, and a little first-grader stood up, and he said, 'I can explain segregation,' and proceeded to explain all the scenes from 'Hidden Figures.' And I died because that's everything.