“A new friend is new wine, when it grows old, you will enjoy drinking it.”

Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS.

[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.

Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same.

That’s the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.

I don’t even drink! I can’t stand the taste of alcohol. Every New Year’s Eve I try one drink and every time it makes me feel sick.

I set goals, take control, drink out my own bottle. I make mistakes but learn from every one.

Drinking your milk and talking at the same time may result in your having to be patted on the back and dried for quite a long time afterwords.

Promise me one thing: don’t take me home until I’m drunk – very drunk indeed.

Great wine requires a mad man to grow the vine, a wise man to watch over it, a lucid poet to make it, and a lover to drink it.

Let me be the first to tell you, drinking alcohol is the worst thing to do in cold weather. Hot soup is the best because the process of digesting food helps to warm you up.