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

Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way.

There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.

What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning to be self-critical?

Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.

You can measure a programmer’s perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.

It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program.

In English every word can be verbed.

Dealing with failure is easy.

When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.

One can’t proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.

A good programming language is a conceptual universe for thinking about programming.

Optimization hinders evolution.

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

I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun.

Because of its vitality, the computing field is always in desperate need of new cliches.

That it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?

I am still encouraged to go on. I wouldn’t know where else to go.

If you can’t be yourself, what’s the point of being anyone else?

Everything in life is somewhere else, and you get there in a car.

Books open your mind, broaden your mind, and strengthen you as nothing else can.

Unfortunately sometimes one can’t do what one thinks is right without making someone else unhappy.

In jail I was just like everybody else, I was sitting there praying, feeling caged.

Cameras are a lifesaver for very shy people who have nowhere else to hide. Behind a lens they can disguise the fact that they have nothing to say to strangers.

Religion has everything on its side: revelation, prophecies, government protection, the highest dignity and eminence. . . and more than this, the invaluable prerogative of being allowed to imprint its doctrines on the mind at a tender age of childhood, whereby they become almost innate ideas.