“Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.”

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.

The tree of research must be fed from time to time with the blood of bean-counters, for it is its natural manure.

Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.

In high school, I majored in brick masonry.

Believing I had supernatural powers, I slammed into a brick wall.

Vladimir Putin is a smart guy. I don’t like him, smart guy. He is going to advance the cause of Russia until he hits a brick wall. He’s hit a brick wall in a few areas.

I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.

A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.

Fame hit me like a ton of bricks.

Remember, don’t try to build the greatest wall that’s ever been built. Focus on laying a single, expertly-placed brick. Then keep doing that, every day.

Guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall against which we all flounder; they serve none of our futures.