“I fear – as far as I can tell – that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.”

The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas.

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.

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.

The first meeting in 1983 was held in India and I was very off put by her. I just couldn’t abide her, basically.

Basically it takes me very little time to write a song. If I find myself taking more than an hour to do it I usually forget it, and try something else.

Once you see your nature, sex is basically immaterial.

My mom used to tell me, I can’t use this phrase on the radio – but basically don’t be one of those dudes hanging on the corner.

All that counts is the truth. Without it you’re basically just juggling people’s daft ideas.

The Way is basically perfect. It doesn’t require perfecting.

Many roads lead to the Path, but basically there are only two: reason and practice.

For ‘Conan,’ I had to eat boiled chicken breast and work out all the time and basically eat like a bird every two hours and stay ripped.