Neal Stephenson Quotes

I never took a computer science course in college, because then it was a thing you just learned on your own.

I've never studied anything formally. I was excluded from school at the age of 17, so I am an autodidact, which is a word that I have taught myself.

I taught myself how to play the guitar. I never studied music.

I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.

I have no schooling in any normal sense but have learned from the best as far as just doing things. I learned filmmaking from loving movies and then just saying, 'OK, let's do it.'

I was around computers from birth; we had one of the first Macs, which came out shortly before I was born, and my dad ran a company that wrote computer operating systems. I don't think I have any particular technical skills; I just got a really large head start.

I haven't had any formal education. Through the grace of god, I am gifted in mathematics and the English language.

Actually I've never had formal training, I was lucky enough to continue working most of my career and aside from sitting in on a couple of classes, here and there, I basically just use my own instincts.

I'm all self-taught. I never had a teacher. Even for English, and French, and German, I hardly went to school.

I'm not very technically minded. I mean, I don't know how to do e-mail on computers.

I have no formal training as a writer at all, not even a single English class in college.

I don't need to spend money on school when I can just do it myself. I have pretty much everything I need with a camera and some funny friends.

Ashok Mehta did not go to any institute. He did not carry the baggage of formal education.

I am an entrepreneur, but not in the conventional sense. I have learnt business as time passed, but I do not have a B-school education.

I never got a degree; I just started writing.

I am self-educated from genre books.

Many who are self-taught far excel the doctors, masters, and bachelors of the most renowned universities.

I dropped out of college and I'm pretty much a self-educated person, so a lot of my core belief system comes from life.

When I got out of school, I spent two years just hitchhiking around. Every time I met some old farmer who could play banjo, I got him to teach me a lick or two. Little by little, I put it together.

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college.

As a writer, politician, scientist, and businessman, [Ben] Franklin had few equals among the educated of his day-though he left school at ten. (...)Boys like Andrew Carnegie who begged his mother not to send him to school and was well on his way to immortality and fortune at the age of thirteen, would be referred today for psychological counseling; Thomas Edison would find himself in Special Ed until his peculiar genius had been sufficiently tamed.

An artist who is self-taught is taught by a very ignorant person indeed.

I have had no professional training.

He [Mencken] was an autodidact, with all the misplaced confidence and all the astonishing gaps that characterize that breed. Not many of us would venture to write a book about democracy without ever having read de Tocqueville, nor embark on a translation of Nietzsche with only a sketchy knowledge of German.

My education was neglected, yet I was passionately fond of reading.