“To our human minds, computers behave less like rocks and trees than they do like humans, so we unconsciously treat them like people.”

No matter how beautiful, no matter how cool your interface, it would be better if there were less of it.

Design principle: Take things away until the design breaks, then put that last thing back in.

If your persona has goals and the product has magical powers to meet them, how simple could the interaction be? This kind of thinking is useful to help designers look outside the box.

Just how do I design if not with prototyping? An excellent question. The short answer is ‘on paper.’

Typography should not vary widely in an interface.

Ironically, the thing that will likely make the least improvement in the ease of use of software-based products is new technology.

When I was a teenager, that was when I fell in love with music. It affected me in a deep way. That’s why I love having teenagers at our shows.

It has also been said that the software industry is an example of midgets standing on the toes of other midgets.

Men do not greet one another like this … except perhaps at rugby club dinners.

I just like so many different kinds of music that I like experimenting. I don’t want to keep making the same record over and over and over.

As these machines leak into every corner of our lives, they will annoy us, infuriate us, and even kill a few of us.

To scenes by memory’s silver chain Close-linked, and ever yet apart, That like the vine, whose tendrils young Around some fostering branch have clung, Grown with its growth, as tho’ it sprung From one united heart.

In other words, humans have special instincts that tell them how to behave around other sentient beings.

Computer memories work in a manner alien to human memories. My memory lets me recognize the faces of my friends, whereas my own computer never even recognizes me.

Because computers have memories, we imagine that they must be something like our human memories, but that is simply not true.

It has been said that the great scientific disciplines are examples of giants standing on the shoulders of other giants.

And when they decided to beef up their OSs, they went to (different) very old bad mainframe models of OS design to try to adapt to personal computers.

I go to live in Maine for the summer. Without computer, and without the telephone service we are mercifully without the faxes and e-mails.

Computer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable.

The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.

When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it’s the first personal computer worth criticizing.

I don’t know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras.

My computer’s memory stores a million phone numbers with perfect accuracy, but I have to stop and think to recall my own.

Computer memories work in a manner alien to human memories. My memory lets me recognize the faces of my friends, whereas my own computer never even recognizes me.