The sun comes up just about as often as it goes down, in the long run, but this doesn't make its motion random.

How can you own numbers? Numbers belong to the world.

These machines have no common sense; they have not yet learned to "think," and they do exactly as they are told, no more and no less. This fact is the hardest concept to grasp when one first tries to use a computer.

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

The psychological profiling [of a programmer] is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large.

The most important thing in the kitchen is the waste paper basket and it needs to be centrally located.

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.