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Back on the call to Young, I sense he is getting tired we've been speaking for well over an hour, and I've been informed that he has been working round the clock preparing for his forthcoming performance. I start to wrap up our interview, and as I get ready to say goodbye, he says, very sincerely: 'I really hope I have answered your questions and that my answers have been useful to you,' and thanks me for taking an interest in his work.

I thank him back and, although I've been advised not to ask about his influence on pop and rock musicians - apparently he takes no interest in it-I decide that, since we've stayed on such good terms, I'll venture one last question about his legacy and how it feels to have shaped the careers of so many other artists within and far beyond his own practice.

'Is it true?' he asks, before chuckling to himself for a while. And then finally he replies, 'The thing is, it's not about ego gratification. It's about trying to do the right thing, and if you try to do the right thing with your life and other people agree you're doing the right thing, then that's very satisfying.'

— Everything We Do Is Music by Elizabeth Alker

J. Robert Oppenheimer: We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu [a principal Hindu deity] is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now I have become death, the destroyer of the worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.

Charles L. Critchfield: That famous saying that Oppenheimer made when the bomb finally went off—“I have become death, the shatterer of worlds.”—it’s always said that it’s a quotation from the Gita, but of course it isn’t, because it’s in English. I looked through these three volumes of Gitas for that line and it’s there. But it’s very different from the way Robert says it. Chapter 11 is called “The Book of the Manifesting of the One and Manifold.” In Verse 12 of that chapter, it says, “If a thousand suns should at once blaze up in the sky, the light of that mighty soul would be all their brightness”—the “mighty soul” being God, of course. In Verse 31 of that chapter, the soldier Arjuna says, “Tell me, you awful form, who are you?” Krishna says, “I am time, destroyer of worlds.” The word “time” is the Sanskrit word “karma,” which is used in a sense that means “Father Time” and, therefore, can be associated with death and with the Supreme Deity. I suspect Robert made up his own [translation] because he read Sanskrit. I wouldn’t put it past him to have rehearsed this saying so that he’d be prepared to be dramatic, because he liked to be dramatic.

— The Devil Reached Toward the Sky by Garrett M. Graff