Stephen Jay Gould: I’m not going to be 50 for another few months, so I think I can be spared the need to do such large-scale retrospectives, but in a smaller sense, I have wanted to be a paleontologist since I was five or six years old. I had a very imperfect conception of what it was when I was five. I thought it meant going out West and collecting dinosaur bones all your life. But sometimes I look back and say, “My goodness, I actually did it.” And I’ve been successful enough at it, and I’ve enjoyed it as much as I thought I would, and it’s as fine a field as I’ve ever hoped. So it’s very satisfactory.