I would have loved to have been science-minded enough to be in the caring profession - either as a doctor or nurse or vet.

If you fix your sense of self to your job, then you're heading for disaster.

I wanted to set 'Heading Out' in a real world, a concept I originally struggled with, as I don't have a proper job.

Performers only get to do their showing off because the public pay to see them. To deny your audience a photo, whatever the format, seems a little rude to me.

I'm a big believer that science is part of a larger cultural thing. Science is not all by itself.

I think science is about the search for God; it just comes at it from a different angle than religion.

Doctors are human animals. They want to be loved, they are tribal, they instinctually favor stories over scientific evidence, they make mistakes, and even small gifts make them susceptible to being biased. If we took doctors seriously as human animals, we might hurt them - and they might hurt us - a lot less.

When it comes down to it, the reason that science fiction endures is that it is, at its core, an optimistic genre. What it says at the end of the day is that there is a tomorrow, we do go on, we don't extinguish ourselves and leave the planet to the cockroaches.