“If you’re not failing 90% of the time, then you’re probably not working on sufficiently challenging problems.”

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.

The perfume part is important because it will help find the knowledge again to help get to the destinations the inner urges pick.

School is basically about one point of view – the one the teacher has or the textbooks have.

The most disastrous thing that you can ever learn is your first programming language.

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.

By the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books.

It is not a tool, although it can act like many tools. It is the first metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before encountered and as yet barely investigated.

Hee Haw was probably my biggest exposure to live music at a young age.

I probably should put a little more energy into it.

New York waiters, probably the surliest in the Western world . . . are better images of their city than that journalistic favorite the taxi driver.

Probably some of the songs I never even really listened to the lyrics.

Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader’s imagination as the characters in their books.

It can bend and twist and stretch, and probably the best way to think about space is to just kind of imagine a big piece of rubber that you can pull and twist and bend.

I really love storytelling, and I love the stories as they reveal themselves. It’s an incredibly nourishing process; it’s probably the closest I come to having a religion.

The probability of ten consecutive heads is 0.1 percent; thus, when you have millions of coin tossers, or investors, in the end there will be thousands of very successful practitioners of coin tossing, or stock picking.