when you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.

What does it take to build something so that it’s really easy to make comfortable little modifications in a way that once you’ve made them, they feel integral with the nature and structure of what is already there?

Creators need an immediate connection to what they're creating. If you make a change, you need to see the effect of that immediately.

A good creative tool should let people make ugly but unexpected things, I think. Any new capability that yields only beautiful things is a subtle kind of tyranny.

Carving nature by its joints.

You can and must understand computers NOW.

the pot is shaped by your hands and the clay

No one could accuse Building 20 of burying its Services too deep in the Structure. Recabling from office to office, lab to lab, or even wing to wing is largely a matter of do-it-yourself. Rather than a burden, the occupants consider this a benefit. The wide wood stairs in Building 20 show wear in a way that adds to its myth. You feel yourself walking in historic footsteps in pursuit of technical solutions that might be elegant precisely because they are quick and dirty. And that describes the building: elegant because it is quick and dirty.

We build our computer systems the way we build our cities: over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.

Personal Mastery: If a system is to serve the creative spirit, it must be entirely comprehensible to a single individual.

Seeing is the act of forgetting the name of the thing one sees

This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other.