What's hard, in hacking as in fiction, is not writing, it's deciding what to write.

As convenient as it is for information to come to us, libraries do have a valuable side effect: they force all of the smart people to come together in one place where they can interact with one another.

This made him a grad student, and grad students existed not to learn things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research.

Whenever serious and competent people need to get things done in the real world, all considerations of tradition and protocol fly out the window.

Once a person has all the things they need to live, everything else is entertainment.

Of course, the underlying structure of everything in England is posh. There is no in-between with these people. You have to walk a mile to find a telephone booth, but when you find it, it is built as if the senseless dynamiting of pay phones had been a serious problem at some time in the past. And a British mailbox can presumably stop a German tank.

Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history.