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.

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 hardest thing is to go to sleep at night, when there are so many urgent things needing to be done. A huge gap exists between what we know is possible with today's machines and what we have so far been able to finish.

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

People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.

In fact what I would like to see is thousands of computer scientists let loose to do whatever they want. That's what really advances the field.