“Everything should be built top-down, except the first time.”

A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.

Motto for a research laboratory: what we work on today, others will first think of tomorrow.

The best book on programming for the layman is Alice in Wonderland, but that’s because it’s the best book on anything for the layman.

A picture is worth 10K words – but only those to describe the picture.

Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.

When someone says, “I want a programming language in which I need only say what I want done,” give him a lollipop.

C programmers never die. They are just cast into void.

Training will not substantially help matters. We have to learn to live with it.

It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than to have 10 functions operate on 10 data structures.

We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines.

In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.

There is no such thing as a free variable.

Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but withstand progress.

You’ve solved the wrong problem. Work hard to improve.

It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.

In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm.

Deep down, there is in the substance of the cosmos a primordial disposition, sui generis, for self-arrangement and self-involution.

I would sit down with a guitar and write 11 or 12 good songs for an album and that is gonna take a long time.

I’m more of a cringer at first and when it is years down the road and out of my way, I can actually appreciate it somehow.

Deep down, no one really believes they have a right to live. But this death sentence generally stays tucked away, hidden beneath the difficulty of living. If that difficulty is removed from time to time, death is suddenly there, unintelligibly.

I don’t believe in dying. It’s been done. I’m working on a new exit. Besides, I can’t die now – I’m booked.

I have osteoarthritis so bad… I can walk up a hill; I just can’t walk down one.

I try to think of myself as a lion, bringing down the kill, controlling the jungle.

First you forget names, then you forget faces. Next you forget to pull your zipper up and finally, you forget to pull it down.