“Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we’re all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.”

[Computing] is just a fabulous place for that, because it’s a place where you don’t have to be a Ph.D. or anything else. It’s a place where you can still be an artisan.

The soft nerds are the ones who get violently ill whenever anybody mentions an integral sign.

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

Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising.

When I first prepared this particular talk…

Art also has this element. Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we’re in – the one that we think is reality.

I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three.

To get the medium’s magic to work for one’s aims rather than against them is to attain literacy.

I hired finishers because I’m a good starter and a poor finisher.

I realized that my usual approach is usually critical. That is, a lot of the things that I do, that most people do, are because they hate something somebody else has done, or they hate that something hasn’t been done.

Don’t worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

The only way you can predict the future is to build it.

Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.

The flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully.

The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide.

I knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I had already been exposed to other points of view.

Quality is the responsibility of the top people. Its origin is in the boardroom. They are the ones who decide.

They don’t come off. I walk into a lot of very high-level boardrooms now, and I present to distinguished conferences, but these bracelets remind me of the places I’ve been and the people I’ve met.