Once in a while a person does only one thing in his whole life, and we'll talk about that later, but a lot of times there is repetition. I claim that luck will not cover everything. And I will cite Pasteur who said, "Luck favors the prepared mind." And I think that says it the way I believe it.

Good teachers deserve apples; great teachers deserve chocolate. A favorite quotation, written in calligraphy on his office door.

The most dangerous thought you can have as a creative person is to think you know what you’re doing.

When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did [Claude Elwood] Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you.

Perhaps the central problem we face in all of computer science is how we are to get to the situation where we build on top of the work of others rather than redoing so much of it in a trivially different way.

He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important.

Computer scientists stand on each other's feet.