Larry Wall Quotes

One of the things that Java is good at is giving you this homogeneous view of a reality that's usually very heterogeneous.

I think Zelda 64 is utilizing about 90 percent of the N64 potential, ... When we made Mario 64 we were simply utilizing 60 to 70 percent. So we have come a long way I believe.

The court finds everyone to be in contempt (including himself :-), and orders everyone sentenced to five years hard labor. (Working on Perl, of course.)

Almost nothing in Perl serves a single purpose.

It's certainly easy to calculate the average attendance for Perl conferences.

I think a lot of great software has been written by people who are scratching a short-term itch, something which has been niggling them for ages, but in the back of their mind they’ve got a wonderful long-term plan.

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

I believe in whatever gets you throught the night. [...] Night is the hardest time to be alive. For me, anyway. It lasts so long, and four A.M.knows all my secrets.

I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it.

If what they say is right we're none of us going to have time to do all that we planned to do. But we can keep on doing it as long as we can.

The truth of the matter is that all we have to do is live long enough and we will suffer.

What a funny watch!’ she remarked. ‘It tells the day of the month, and doesn’t tell what o’clock it is!’ ‘Why should it?’ muttered the Hatter. ‘Does YOUR watch tell you what year it is?’ ‘Of course not,’ Alice replied very readily: ‘but that’s because it stays the same year for such a long time together.’ ‘Which is just the case with MINE,’ said the Hatter.

Politicians nowadays treat Americans like medical orderlies treat Alzheimer's patients, telling them anything that will keep them subdued. It doesn't matter what untruths the people are fed because they will not long remember. But in politics, forgotten falsehoods almost guarantee new treachery.

When you look at the whole explosion of the Internet, the decline of print journalism, there are all of these plus-or-minus ramifications, and you have to work it out. The great thing about books is that you have a tactile thing that's there. You can download this or download that, but how long do you want to be staring at a screen for the rest of your life? You've got to have some kind of proper interface for people that's not about the screen.

I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy as long as I can paint.

Life is one long training session in preparation for what will come. Life and death lose their meaning; there are only challenges to be met with joy and overcome with tranquility.

There's nothing wrong with being a terrorist, as long as you win. Then you write history.

It's been a long rocky life, with plenty of possibility but too much human ugliness.

There were long stretches where each of us was engaged in a private world of rapidly shifting vignettes. Always I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of human beings ebbing and flowing like the tides of the sea.

Do you know who Karl Marx is? He is this strange little man, long dead, who lived his narrow little life, and somehow managed by the power of his wayward brain to lay hold upon millions of human lives!

The work I prefer to do are the smaller budget pictures, television can be great but it ties you up for quite a long time.

I have never seen an experienced programmer who routinely made detailed flow charts before beginning to write programs.

How many films are there about friendships between teenagers? And how many projects are there dealing with friendships among adults? True friendships - really dealing with the intimacy behind what happened then, and how long you've known each other, and the wounds that haven't healed. That's what [About Alex] film is about.

Piper went a little crazy. She cried out with relief and dove straight into the water. What was she thinking? She didn't take a rope or a life vest or anything. But at the moment, she was just so happy that she paddled over to Leo and kissed him on the cheek, which kind of surprised him. "Miss me?" Leo laughed. Piper was suddenly furious. "Where were you? How are you guys alive?" "Long story," he said. A picnic basket bobbed to the surface next to him. "Want a brownie?

...in their millenial and long-lived patience they knew quite well how, in a hundred years, or a thousand years' time, or else, perhaps, tomorrow, in an hour's time, for it was all a gamble, a million to one chance, but all the same there was a chance that if they kept on shaking their chains, one day, some day, the clasps upon the shackles would part.