Can you imagine young people nowadays making a stu...

I realized that I would have some very tough sledding, and I was very discouraged because I didn't see much hope of getting into the field I wanted to get into with no college education.

It was depressing, very depressing. I worried about how I would make a living. I didn't want to stay on the farm. It didn't offer the challenge I wanted and yet, without a college education, I felt that I was really out of luck.

I think the driving thing was curiosity about the universe. That fascinated me. I didn't think anything about being famous or anything like that, I was just interested in the concepts involved.

As a precocious teen I dreamed of being Graham Greene. Well, as it turned out, I never wrote a great novel, sadly, and I never converted to Catholicism, happily, but I did do one thing he did. That is, in middle age I moved to a seaside town and got into a right barney with the local powers-that-be.

I'm a teenager, but I'm independent - I have my own apartment, I have my own life. And I think I have learned more than any of those teenagers have in school. I learned to be responsible, leaving my family and coming here alone.

I have always had a sense that we are all pretty much alone in life, particularly in adolescence.

Being a teenager is an amazing time and a hard time. It's when you make your best friends - I have girls who will never leave my heart and I still talk to. You get the best and the worst as a teen. You have the best friendships and the worst heartbreaks.