Early on, I settled on the first-person strategy as a way to deal with exposition and world-description issues. As long as the book is, it could have been far longer had I gone with an omniscient third-person narrator, or multiple point-of-view characters, since either of those would have enabled me to impart much more detailed information about the history and geography of the world.

Crappy old OSes have value in the basically negative sense that changing to new ones makes us wish we'd never been born.

The difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent.

Give me an adventure. I'm not talking about some massive adventure. Just something that would make getting fired seem small. Something that I might remember when I'm old." "I can't predict the future," I said, "but based on what little I know so far, I'm afraid it has to be a massive adventure or nothing." "Great!" "Probably the kind of adventure that ends in a mass burial.

It is exciting to discover electrons and figure out the equations that govern their movement; it is boring to use those principles to design electric can openers. From here on out, it's all can openers.

[Emacs] is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful.

Of persons I will say this: it is difficult to tell when they are running aright but easy to see when something has gone awry.