Art is subject to arbitrary fashion.
Kary Mullis

Do we care about these people that are HIV-positive whose lives have been ruined? Those are the people I'm the most concerned about. Every night I think about this.
Kary Mullis

Each of us have things and thoughts and descriptions of an amazing universe in our possession that kings in the 17th Century would have gone to war to possess.
Kary Mullis

Here's a bunch of people practising a new set of behavioural norms. Apparently it didn't work because a lot of them got sick. That's the conclusion. You don't necessarily know why it happened. But you start there.
Kary Mullis

I can say exactly what I feel about any issue, and I'm going to do that.
Kary Mullis

I'm not politically correct.
Kary Mullis

I'm really optimistic in the mornings.
Kary Mullis

I've been writing about my boyhood, when I was a little kid back on my grandfather's farm where we didn't know about black widow spiders or all that stuff. But writing about that is so easy.
Kary Mullis

In the 1950s in Columbia, South Carolina, it was considered OK for kids to play with weird things. We could go to the hardware store and buy 100 feet of dynamite fuse.
Kary Mullis

It's not blaming the victim. It's not anybody's fault. They just did something that didn't work, that's all.
Kary Mullis


Law shuttles between freeing us and enslaving us.
Kary Mullis

My mother would give my brothers and me a pile of catalogues and let us pick what we wanted for Christmas.
Kary Mullis

PCR made it easier to see that certain people are infected with HIV.
Kary Mullis

People don't realize that molecules themselves are somewhat hypothetical, and that their interactions are more so, and that the biological reactions are even more so.
Kary Mullis

People realize this man knows what the hell's going on and nobody else does.
Kary Mullis

Religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself.
Kary Mullis

Science consistently produces a new crop of miraculous truths and dazzling devices every year.
Kary Mullis

Science grows like a weed every year.
Kary Mullis

Sometimes in the morning, when it's a good surf, I go out there, and I don't feel like it's a bad world.
Kary Mullis

The horror of it is, every goddamn thing you look at seems pretty scary to me.
Kary Mullis