“The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.”

Because the web has produced so much uninformed criticism. It’s kind of a Gresham’s Law-bad money drives the good money out of circulation.

This tends to result in very dumbed-down products that are easy to get started on, but are generally worthless and/or debilitating.

There will be always unresolved ambiguity here.

In success there’s a tendency to keep on doing what you were doing.

There’s a real sense in which MS and Apple never understood networking or operating systems (or what objects really are).

Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it.

It’s easier to invent the future than to predict it.

People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

There’s an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the “Aha.”

We cannot predict the future, but we can invent it.

Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.

Change is easy, except for the changed part.

I think the trick with knowledge is to “acquire it, and forget all except the perfume” – because it is noisy and sometimes drowns out one’s own “brain voices”.

Humans are communications junkies. We just can’t get enough.

The idea that hardware on networks should just be caches for movable process descriptions and the processes themselves goes back quite a ways.

Comic books aren’t nerdy. You’d have to be an idiot to think computers are nerdy.

I don’t know anything about computers.

I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient is not by staring at the computer screen but by going to see the patient; it’s only at the bedside that I can figure out what is important.

Literary genres and techniques tend to take form in one’s mind somewhat the way computer templates provide form for different computer tasks.

Bill Gates did predict that computers for people made sense because he wrote a basic.

When we first started with Apple computers, it was my dream that everyone would learn to program, and that was how they’d use their computer.

Why we do what we do: that moment when you get to see the future on your computer screen before the rest of the world.

My goal wasn’t to make a ton of money. It was to build good computers.