I suppose I should learn Lisp, but it seems so foreign.

Everyone by now presumably knows about the danger of premature optimization. I think we should be just as worried about premature design - designing too early what a program should do.

Small-business customers are very conservative and very cheap. We don't have to explain ourselves for the most part.

Dressing up is inevitably a substitute for good ideas. It is no coincidence that technically inept business types are known as 'suits'.

I suppose I should learn Lisp, but it seems so foreign.

For the most ambitious young people, the corporate ladder is obsolete.

A programming language is for thinking about programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen.

We don't have to go that far to sell our beer because our immediate accounts sell so much. Places that sold 10 cases before, now they're selling 30.

Empirically the way you get a product visionary as CEO is for him to found the company and not get fired.

I get a lot of criticism for telling founders to focus first on making something great, instead of worrying about how to make money. And yet that is exactly what Google did. And Apple, for that matter. You'd think examples like that would be enough to convince people.

If you could replace high-school yearbooks, that could be a lot of money. It's so clearly waiting for someone to come along.

If you imagine someone with 100 percent determination and 100 percent intelligence, you can discard a lot of intelligence before they stop succeeding. But if you start discarding determination, you very quickly get an ineffectual and perpetual grad student.

If you really understand something, you can say it in the fewest words, instead of thrashing about.

In the startup world, 'not working' is normal.

It's hard to say exactly what it is about face-to-face contact that makes deals happen, but whatever it is, it hasn't yet been duplicated by technology.

Like having a child, running a startup is the sort of experience that's hard to imagine unless you've done it yourself.

One startup I dream of funding is the one that kills the record companies.

Some people just get what they want in the world.

Startups often have to do dubious things.

There are plenty of smart people who get nowhere.

What I tell founders is not to sweat the business model too much at first. The most important task at first is to build something people want. If you don't do that, it won't matter how clever your business model is.

When Facebook first started, and it was just a social directory for undergrads at Harvard, it would have seemed like such a bad startup idea, like some student side project.

You know your business model is broken when you're suing your customers.

The way to do really big things seems to be to start with deceptively small things.

Relentlessly prune bullshit, don’t wait to do things that matter, and savor the time you have.

This is a good plan for life in general. If you have two choices choose the harder.

The most important thing is not to let fundraising get you down. Startups live or die on morale. If you let the difficulty of raising money destroy your morale it will become a self fulfilling prophecy.

You know your business model is broken when youre suing your customers.

In programming the hard part isn't solving problems, but deciding what problems to solve.

The only good reason to embrace a philosophical position is that you are convinced it is true or at least makes sense of the world better than the alternatives.

I grew up in the Canaan Baptist Church.

I think the Cowboys are one of only two teams in all of sports that engender love and hate to that extreme. The other is the Yankees. You love the Yankees or you hate the Yankees.

When I need to think of, like, a peaceful scene or something, I think of my back garden in summertime. And whenever I hear the lawnmower next door, I always think it's really peaceful.

Please don't erase my race because I'm white-passing. There is literally nothing I can do about my complexion.

Peace is not a state - it is a choice, and you have to remake it every day. It's possible to get a sort of stability, a habit of peace, but it's like an egg balanced, spinning, on its point: lose your momentum, and your equilibrium is gone, too.

To be a part of Laika's universe is an opportunity not to be passed up.

I had friends in this band called Mars and they used to play a lot.

I started digging and found that Israel signed a peace treaty with the United Arab Emirates after the country had diversified their economy, instead of being solely oil-based. This diversification had brought about modernization. I realized that if you land the price of oil, countries will diversify their economies and as a result, modernize.

I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general propositions - adding that no general proposition is worth a damn.

I don't have a favorite genre. I love to work and live vicariously through every character. It's all about trying to bring the character to life and get the story across in a way that resonates with the audience. It's always interesting and challenging in a gratifying and unique way.

I've done truth to power all my life. It's got me into trouble, but who cares?

I sign every autograph I can for kids because I remember myself at that age. I think it's ridiculous that some guys won't sign for a kid.

Take care to sell your horse before he dies. The art of life is passing losses on.

You can't live for literature. You can't live for the job.

And so for a time it looked as if all the adventures were coming to an end; but that was not to be.

As athletes, most of the time we deal with fans cussing at us, saying how much we suck.

Revolution is born as a social entity within the oppressor society.

Much of the wisdom of one age, is the folly of the next.

To succeed, you will soon learn, as I did, the importance of a solid foundation in the basics of education - literacy, both verbal and numerical, and communication skills.