James Gunn discusses his childhood experiences and working with father to fix things; building telescopes as a boy; early reading in astronomy and cosmology; early preference for steady state model; education at Rice and California Institute of Technology (Caltech); thesis on correlation functions of galaxies; building an analog computer as a graduate student; reasons for building instruments; building a silicon-intensified target vidicon spectrograph; contributing to bringing charged coupled devices (CCDs) to astronomy; importance of hands-on experience in observational astronomy; new questions in cosmology made relevant by the inflationary universe model; too many theoretical frameworks in cosmology today; attitudes toward the inflationary universe model, the flatness problem, the horizon problem, and the anthropic principle; attitude toward de Lapparent, Geller, and Huchra's work on large-scale inhomogeneities; Cornell work on inhomogeneities; over interpretation of data; use of mental pictures in science; interaction of theory and observation in cosmology; the balance between observations and speculation in science; the ideal design for a universe; the question of whether the universe has a point; the conflict between big science and little science.