Tennis and girls at Cambridge

They say all [James Watson] did in Cambridge was play tennis and chase girls. But there was a serious point to that. I sometimes envied Jim. My own problem took thousands of hours of hard work, measurements, calculations. I often thought that there must be some way to cut through it—that there must be, if only I could see it, an elegant solution. There wasn’t any. For Jim’s there was an elegant solution, which is what I admired. He found it partly because he never made the mistake of confusing hard work with hard thinking; he always refused to substitute one for the other. Of course, he had time for tennis and girls.

—Max Perutz