“In computers, every ‘new explosion’ was set off by a software product that allowed users to program differently.”

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.

When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free?

Someday it’ll all be done by machine. Information machines.

I got my computer. The great thing about the computer is that you only need enough money to buy a computer and some food, and you’re all right. I don’t have to go to premières.

Unless in communicating with it one says exactly what one means, trouble is bound to result.

The computer can’t tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what’s missing is the eyebrows.

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

The heat from your computer is not wasted if you need to heat your home.

Do everything by hand, even when using the computer.

When I’m at home, I love playing action-oriented computer games.