My favorite books are the ones that make me smile for hours after reading them. I want that for my readers, for the sweetness to linger. Sort of like chocolate, but without the calories.

After my husband John Lennon passed away, I tried to smile for my health.

The last time I saw Ted Kennedy was a generation after my first meeting, at the Senate subway below the Capitol on Obama's Inauguration Day. He was his usual gregarious and gracious self - with beaming smile and booming voice wishing my husband and me good luck with our pregnancy and expressing his excitement about the new president.

I suffered from post-natal depression after Rowan was born. I had a healthy, beautiful baby girl and I couldn't look at her. I couldn't hold her, smile at her. All I wanted was to disappear and die.

I never laugh or smile when I am writing. When I come home for lunch after writing all morning, my wife says I look like I just came home from a funeral. This is not bragging. This is an illness.

I wish I was told to look after my teeth when I was younger. My smile is really important to me and one of my biggest assets, so I'm very conscious that I need to keep it in top condition.

The spotlight, attention, all that doesn't really matter. You go home to your daughter, even after a loss when you're upset and you don't want to talk to anybody. You see her crack that smile, and it changes your day.

We tried to set up a company that patterned ourselves after Southwest in all the fun, the spirit, the great people, the smile, the efficiency side of it, but we've added some extras that people aren't used to finding on Southwest.

Country music in the mid-'90s was a big influence on my career, and I played all the songs that are referenced in '94' back in my club days. Joe Diffie was rocking a sick mullet, and he was hotter than ever... just putting out monster hit after monster hit. It totally takes me back to those days, and it makes me smile every time I hear it.

After I had this idea to be Bill Nye the Science Guy, I wore straight ties the first couple times, and then I got this thing going and I started wearing bow ties.

In science, if you don't do it, somebody else will. Whereas in art, if Beethoven didn't compose the 'Ninth Symphony,' no one else before or after is going to compose the 'Ninth Symphony' that he composed; no one else is going to paint 'Starry Night' by van Gogh.

If the history of resistance to Darwinian thinking is a good measure, we can expect that long into the future, long after every triumph of human thought has been matched or surpassed by 'mere machines,' there will still be thinkers who insist that the human mind works in mysterious ways that no science can comprehend.

I've always been interested in medicine and was pleased when my brother became a doctor. But after thinking seriously about that field, I realized that what intrigued me was not the science, not the chemistry or biology of medicine, but the narrative - the story of each patient, each illness.

When I was young, I did varied after-school activities - I did art, drama, science, math. I'm not the sporty kind of person, but I did get a certificate on outdoor recreation.

This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle; wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.

One afternoon, on my way to the campus - I was majoring in political science at Nairobi University - a photographer by the name of Peter Beard stopped me in the street and asked me if I'd ever been photographed.

For me, the discovery of aquaporins was like a gift after 25 years in basic science.

I actually started off majoring in computer science, but I knew right away I wasn't going to stay with it. It was because I had this one professor who was the loneliest, saddest man I've ever known. He was a programmer, and I knew that I didn't want to do whatever he did. So after that, I switched to Communications.

This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle wonderful, inscrutable, magical and more, to whosoever will think of it.

What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what's going on.

What is sad to me is not what Bill Nye thinks about me. What I found really unfortunate is that after presenting my stand on God's Word, there were a number of Christians who were more complimentary of Bill Nye than of me because Bill Nye was defending evolution and billions of years.

I'm not bothered or sad about being on my own - after all, I've never had a husband.

I was really sad after 'The Avengers' when I realized I was not going to have a part in 'Thor 2' or 'Captain America: The Winter Soldier.' But I'm not arguing with my fantastic plane and my really cool car.

It sounds so nerdy and pathetic, but what I always do on Sunday afternoon is bring my inbox down to zero, which is so sad. But e-mail has become like homework for adults. I'll have 141 messages from people who will be offended if I don't write back.