Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.

Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.

Experience does by no means automatically leads to wisdom and understanding.

About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.

I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself "Dijkstra would not have liked this," well, that would be enough immortality for me.

Write a paper promising salvation, make it a "structured" something or a "virtual" something, or "abstract," "distributed" or "higher-order" or "applicative" and you can almost be certain of having started a new cult.

... as a slow-witted human being I have a very small head and I had better learn to live with it and to respect my limitations and give them full credit, rather than to try to ignore them, for the latter vain effort will be punished by failure.