In this interview Fred Hoyle discusses his childhood and growing up in Yorkshire; parental background and influences; early reading in science; early experience with literature; influence of Eddington's books; education at Cambridge; interest in mathematics; early interest in exploring cosmology after World War II; history of development of steady state model; influence of Dirac and preference for understanding mathematics first; thesis work with Dirac; personality of Dirac; history of work on nucleosynthesis in stars: the Cavendish Laboratory, nucleosynthesis in supernovae, carbon production in helium burning, the triple alpha reaction and the excited state of carbon, collaboration with William Fowler, important paper by Al Cameron, work with Fowler and Geoffrey and E. Margaret Burbidge; nonstellar production of helium; defense of the steady state model; "little big bangs" in the steady state picture; Hoyle and Taylor work in 1964 on limiting the number of types of neutrinos; motives in doing science; rejection of big bang model from biological considerations; reading in biology; early career as a popularizer of science; role of particle physicists in making cosmology a respectable science; Mach's principle; attitudes toward the horizon problem, the flatness problem, and the inflationary universe model; Hoyle's work on inflationary behavior within the steady state model; reasons why the inflationary universe model has been influential; attitude toward the de Lapparent, Geller, and Huchra work on large-scale inhomogeneity and influence of that work; theory versus observations in cosmology and problems with the big bang model; attitude toward work on the early universe; importance of long-range interactions and boundary conditions in the laws of physics; ideal design of the universe; question of whether the universe has a purpose.