When you're on your deathbed, you probably aren't counting the movies you've made.

I don't rehearse a lot. I try to keep it organic. Even in movies, the less I rehearse, the better I am.

With improv, it's a combination of listening and not trying to be funny.

Programming is the art of algorithm design and the craft of debugging errant code.

Closed environments dominated the computing world of the 1970s and early '80s. An operating system written for a Hewlett-Packard computer ran only on H.P. computers; I.B.M. controlled its software from chips up to the user interfaces.

A computer is a general-purpose machine with which we engage to do some of our deepest thinking and analyzing. This tool brings with it assumptions about structuredness, about defined interfaces being better. Computers abhor error.

Introduced in the 1960s, multitasking is an engineering strategy for making computers more efficient. Human beings are the slowest elements in a system.

People talk about computer programmers as if computers are our whole lives. That's simply not true.

I don't know where anyone ever got the idea that technology, in and of itself, was a savior. Like all human-created 'progress,' computers are problematic, giving and taking away.

To be a programmer is to develop a carefully managed relationship with error. There's no getting around it. You either make your accommodations with failure, or the work will become intolerable.

The biggest problem is that people have stopped being critical about the role of the computer in their lives. These machines went from being feared as Big Brother surrogates to being thought of as metaphors for liberty and individual freedom.

Has Google appropriated the word 'search?' If so, I find it sad. Search is a deep human yearning, an ancient trope in the recorded history of human life.

What I hope is that those with the knowledge of the humanities break into the closed society where code gets written: invade it.

So many people for so many years have promoted technology as the answer to everything. The economy wasn't growing: technology. Poor people: technology. Illness: technology. As if, somehow, technology in and of itself would be a solution. Yet machine values are not always human values.

I broke into the ranks of computing in the early 1980s, when women were just starting to poke their shoulder pads through crowds of men. There was no legal protection against 'hostile environments for women.'

People imagine that programming is logical, a process like fixing a clock. Nothing could be further from the truth.

My approach to being a self-taught programmer was to find out who was smart and who would be helpful, and these were - these are both men and women. And without learning from my co-workers, I never could've gone on in the profession as long as I did.

Staring prejudice in the face imposes a cruel discipline: to structure your anger, to achieve a certain dignity, an angry dignity.

Multitasking, throughput, efficiency - these are excellent machine concepts, useful in the design of computer systems. But are they principles that nurture human thought and imagination?

I think technical people now should learn literature, because literature teaches you a great deal about how - the depths and variety of human imagination.

Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.

The medium is the message.

Mass transportation is doomed to failure in North America because a person's car is the only place where he can be alone and think.

Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either.

We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.

The new electronic independence re-creates the world in the image of a global village.

As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of 'do it yourself.'

The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.

It is the framework which changes with each new technology and not just the picture within the frame.

The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.

The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.

Affluence creates poverty.

Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.

There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.

Darkness is to space what silence is to sound, i.e., the interval.

For tribal man space was the uncontrollable mystery. For technological man it is time that occupies the same role.

Advertising is an environmental striptease for a world of abundance.

Someone made me a Leaf Coneybear finger puppet. Someone made me a portrait of me on some chocolate. I'm keeping it. I daren't eat such a work of art. It's so unique and so fun that fans do that. It's incredibly flattering. I like it when people spend time on me. People don't spend the same amount of time on my brother who's an insurance broker.

The biology of mind bridges the sciences - concerned with the natural world - and the humanities - concerned with the meaning of human experience.

Memory has always fascinated me. Think of it. You can recall at will your first day in high school, your first date, your first love.

Modernism in Vienna brought together science and culture in a new way to create an Age of Insight that emphasized a more complex view of the human mind than had ever existed before.

When I was a medical student in the 1950s, we practically never spoke about Alzheimer's disease. And why is that so? And that is because people didn't live long enough to have Alzheimer's disease.

The problem of psychoanalysis is not the body of theory that Freud left behind, but the fact that it never became a medical science. It never tried to test its ideas.

I went to medical school after having decided to do so somewhere between my junior and senior year at Harvard - very late. I initially wanted to be an intellectual historian.

I love silence. But I usually only listen to that when I'm sleeping.

Being yourself is what will make you survive through anything. If you make music to please someone, it's the first step in the wrong direction. Always do what you believe in, no matter what people say. Only way to go!

What I don't like to hear in music is something has not been thought through: that a sound is just there randomly. I want to make sure that every single little noise that's in my song is there because it's supposed to be there.

I always take care to have interesting chord progressions, because you can have the best sound design in the club, and you'll kill it in the club, but in five years, kids will have better sound design. But if your music is good, you'll always be able to listen to it, even in 20 or 50 years.