“I met Carl Sagan when I was 17.
I had been accepted at Cornell, but didn’t know what college I wanted to go to, and the admissions office saw that.”

“I didn’t know this, but they had forwarded my application to him for his reaction. I had been deep into the universe since I was nine, and Carl Sagan sent me a letter! He didn’t know me from Adam.”

“I’m a 17-year-old kid from the Bronx. He’s a professor of astronomy at Cornell University. And I get this letter, and I open it. It says, ‘I understand you like the same stuff I do. Do you want to come visit the campus to help you decide if you want to go to Cornell?'”

“I was like, ‘Whoa.’ Now he hadn’t done Cosmos (The TV series) yet. But he was already famous, so I took him up on it.”

“I took a bus up to Ithaca, New York. He met me outside his building on a Saturday, invited me up to his office, and I saw the labs. There in front of me, he did something really cool. He reached back, didn’t even look, grabbed a book off the shelf. It was one of his books! I thought that was a badass thing! Didn’t even have to look! And he signed it, ‘To Neil Tyson, future astronomer, Carl.'”

“Later in the day, I’m ready to go back to New York. It began to snow as it often does in December in Ithaca, and he says, ‘Here’s my home number. If the bus can’t get through from the snow, spend the night with my family and go back tomorrow.’

“I’m thinking, ‘Who am I? I’m nobody.’ But I was somebody to him. And I said to myself, ‘If I’m ever as remotely famous as he is, I will treat students the way he has treated me.'”

– Neil deGrasse Tyson, in an interview with Tom Bilyeu