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You know, people come up with formulas who are uncreative. They can't picture something different so they can only go by something that's laid out for them.

I try not to do anything by formula.

I stray away from formulaic, the formatted.

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 want to write formula. I don't want to crank these books out like sausages. Every book is different, which takes a hell of a lot of ingenuity on my part.

The American formula things are out there but they don't have any stories to tell - we have all the stories to tell - but they're all formula.

I try not to observe myself in the process of composing a poem because I don't want to come up with a formula, which I would then be unscrupulous in using.

Culturally, I think we have operated as if we had the formula figured out, and it was all about optimizing, in its various constituent parts, the formula. Now it is about discovering the new formula.

You just can't fake chemistry.

I enjoyed like nothing else working in pure math, discovering new formulas.