Although computer memory is no longer expensive, there's always a finite size buffer somewhere. When a big piece of news arrives, everybody sends a message to everybody else, and the buffer fills.

A cloud is made of billows upon billows upon billows that look like clouds. As you come closer to a cloud you don't get something smooth, but irregularities at a smaller scale.

Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory.

Order doesn't come by itself.

There is a joke that your hammer will always find nails to hit. I find that perfectly acceptable.

There is a saying that every nice piece of work needs the right person in the right place at the right time.

When the weather changes, nobody believes the laws of physics have changed. Similarly, I don't believe that when the stock market goes into terrible gyrations its rules have changed.

The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market.

For much of my life there was no place where the things I wanted to investigate were of interest to anyone.

My fate has been that what I undertook was fully understood only after the fact.

Although computer memory is no longer expensive, there's always a finite size buffer somewhere. When a big piece of news arrives, everybody sends a message to everybody else, and the buffer fills.

I don't seek power and do not run around.

Nobody will deny that there is at least some roughness everywhere.

Most were beginning to feel they had learned enough to last for the rest of their lives. They remained mathematicians, but largely went their own way.

Until a few years ago, the topics in my Ph.D. were unfashionable, but they are very popular today.

I was in an industrial laboratory because academia found me unsuitable.

An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in inventing something.

Think of color, pitch, loudness, heaviness, and hotness. Each is the topic of a branch of physics.

Now that I near 80, I realize with wistful pleasure that on many occasions I was 10, 20, 40, even 50 years ahead of my time.

Unfortunately the world has not been designed for the convenience of mathematicians.

Fractal geometry is not just a chapter of mathematics but one that helps Everyman to see the same world differently.

I'm thinking of going to programming school. Learn how to sit down at any computer and learn to do anything on it. That's all I have left and have interest in.

I said, 'Okay, it's the year 2000, I'm getting a computer and a Palm Pilot.' I know how to check my e-mail, and I've listed some phone numbers on it. Half the time the battery has gone out so I can't use it.

To better understand why you need a personal computer, let's take a look at the pathetic mess you call your life.

I've got a computer, but I won't go near it.

All sorts of computer errors are now turning up. You'd be surprised to know the number of doctors who claim they are treating pregnant men.

All we can do when we think of kids today is think of more hours of school, earlier age at the computer, and curfews. Who would want to grow up in that world?

In OK Computer, the guitar was already moving towards a tone generator as well as a riff generator.

If you put garbage in a computer nothing comes out but garbage. But this garbage, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled and none dare criticize it.

Then in my early teens, when the home computer bubble was blowing, I had one of the first, an Acorn Atom, and used to write primitive adventures on that.

I compose my own stuff. I've been writing songs with words. I've been playing more on the keyboard because I can transpose it to sheet music on the computer.

I always say that my favorite game was Original Adventure, published by both Microsoft and Apple Computer back in 1980.

To err is human - and to blame it on a computer is even more so.

I think computer science, by and large, is still stuck in the Modern age.

It would be nice to design a real briefcase - you open it up and it's your computer but it also stores your books.

I am the farthest thing from a computer genius.

I wish I could have 25,000 years of my personal family history documented in a very powerful computer or a CD-ROM that I could just pop in and my computer would never crash.

The basis of computer work is predicated on the idea that only the brain makes decisions and only the index finger does the work.

In my second year in graduate school, I took a computer course and that was like lightening striking.

Some people may have noticed the new computer shelf at the anchor desk. Rather than phone calls, we want to take real time e-mails, and we'll be starting that very soon.

The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.

The fact that biological, or "natural" rules might help in the creation of a computer generated work of art is interesting, but even a wonderful work of art made in this fashion isn't the same as a person, with all his or her experiences and emotions involved, making art.

Computer modelling for weather forecasting, and indeed for climate forecasting, has reached its limits.

The computer can't tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what's missing is the eyebrows.

I have a son, Mason, who is disabled - cerebral palsy - and he does not walk independently, sit independently or speak. He uses a talking computer. I started becoming an advocate for him when he was 3 years old.

At the risk of being a fuddy-duddy I don't have a computer; I don't have e-mail; and I really don't need something in my house that I would be sitting in front of for hours.

A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.

Stories where the author has known very little, but run a computer program that tells him how to construct a planet, and looked up specific things about rocketry and so on, really suck.

Never ask what sort of computer a guy drives. If he's a Mac user, he'll tell you. If not, why embarrass him?