Miguel de Icaza Quotes

Interleaf is based on the formatting process.

Document preparation systems will also require large screen displays.

All writers are going to have to learn more about science, because it's such an interesting part of their environment.

The first thing the secretary types is the boss.

My assignment was in the communications office, where I typed out dispatches.

Prior to 1980, people used to dictate to a secretary for preparing written documents and that person would then punch keys on a typewriter. I was inspired to invent a medium for doing this work by engaging just one person.

Lexicographer: a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.

It is true that writers often owe their most inspired thoughts, their most extraordinary phrases, to their generous typesetters, who assist their flights of fancy with so-called typographical errors.

Get up from your desk and wander outside occasionally. To be a good writer one needs to be a good observer, and there isn't a lot to be observed at desk level.

As a filmmaker, it's about surviving and lasting. So many talented people that I've known in my life - directors and writers - just haven't made it and haven't had a chance.

I write exclusively using computers. Pens and typewriters can fsck right off - I wrote my first half million words in my teens on a manual typewriter (had to trade it for a new one due to keys snapping from metal fatigue) so I am not a pen or typewriter fetishist.

It was this feeling for a lot of my characters, who are dissidents or banned artists and writers, that they had had to fight living under so much surveillance, and then suddenly they come to America and they're like, I'm not being surveilled - I'm not even being noticed at all.

A man who wants the truth becomes a scientist; a man who wants to give free play to his subjectivity may become a writer; but what should a man do who wants something in between?

I only get writer's block about once a day.

In the printed page the only real things are the paper and the ink; the white spaces play the same part in aiding the eye to take in the meaning of the print as do the black letters.

Writers are damned liars. Every single one of them.

I think all writers have a bit of genius in them, and a bit of talent. Genius retreats but talent improves.

The writer, an old man with a white moustache, had some difficulty getting into bed.

I had no idea what art was. There was one art class in high school, but it didn't make a big impression on me. Then I went to college and thought I'd become a writer.

For me going to war offers me the ability to write about apparently very alien, sometimes hated or despised people, who've been objectified in a way that restores their humanity. Hopefully for my readers, that denies them the ability to objectify them. I think that's the point. If you can do that, that's a good thing.

So I had this problem -- work or starve. So I thought I'd combine the two and decided to become a writer.

I thought of betrayal and how it came so easily - in a word, a glance, a gesture.

That's what a writer does; they make things up and that makes for good reading.

And yes, again, that was it exactly. A retyper and not a writer. A prodigy and not a genius.

[The Office] is incredible. It's slightly overwhelming because you don't think that anything you do....having anybody enjoy what you do is such a treat and so I know I've said this a hundred times but we owe it all to our writers.