We should continually be striving to transform every art into a science: in the process, we advance the art.

It is much more rewarding to do more with less.

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration.

Meta-design is much more difficult than design; it's easier to draw something than to explain how to draw it.

It would be nice if we could design a virtual reality in Hyperbolic Space, and meet each other there.

My general working style is to write everything first with pencil and paper, sitting beside a big wastebasket. Then I use Emacs to enter the text into my machine.

The best programs are written so that computing machines can perform them quickly and so that human beings can understand them clearly. A programmer is ideally an essayist who works with traditional aesthetic and literary forms as well as mathematical concepts, to communicate the way that an algorithm works and to convince a reader that the results will be correct.