“If a listener nods his head when you’re explaining your program, wake him up.”

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.

Work hard to improve. Success is also easy to handle.

Programmers are not to be measured by their ingenuity and their logic but by the completeness of their case analysis.

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

Every reader should ask himself periodically.

One can only display complex information in the mind.

Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.

In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn.

In computing, turning the obvious into the useful is a living definition of the word “frustration”.

I think that it’s extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing.

Like seeing, movement or flow or alteration of view is more important than the static picture, no matter how lovely.

You explain right well, and you shew that you understand argument and are not a mere sophist since you accept that which cannot be denied.

There’s something about an American soldier you can’t explain. They’re so grateful for anything, even a film actress coming to see them.

Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.

Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.

Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.

I’m not explaining this right. What happened was this. There were these beautiful feelings and loose little pleasures inside me. And this woman was something like an assembly line for my soul.

And it was about then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a rather fancy way of saying I started writing.

It’s impossible to explain to a Yankee what `tacky’ is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.