Eric S. Raymond Quotes

If you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

We flew down weekly to meet with IBM, but they thought the way to measure software was the amount of code we wrote, when really the better the software, the fewer lines of code.

...One of the most important lessons, perhaps, is the fact that SOFTWARE IS HARD. From now on I shall have significantly greater respect for every successful software tool that I encounter. During the past decade I was surprised to learn that the writing of programs for TeX and Metafont proved to be much more difficult than all the other things I had done (like proving theorems or writing books). The creation of good software demand a significiantly higher standard of accuracy than those other things do, and it requires a longer attention span than other intellectual tasks.

You can never be an artist if your work comes without effort. That is the problem with modernink from a bottle. You do not have to think. You simply write what is swimming on the top of your brain. And the top is nothing but pond scum, dead leaves, and mosquito spawn.

If the government doesn't fund education, which they often don't, students are going to stay home and not go to school. It affects them directly. But I'm really not interested in writing explicitly about that. I'm really interested in human beings, and in love, and in family. Somehow, politics comes in.

I could not think without writing.

Are you quite sure that all those bells and whistles, all those wonderful facilities of your so called powerful programming languages, belong to the solution set rather than the problem set?

If you taught me to read and provided for me the same computer system as someone has provided for Stephen Hawking, I, too, would write great books. And yet you don't teach me to read, and you don't give me a computer stick I can push around with my nose to point at the next letter I wish typed. So whose fault is it that I am what I am?

The art of drawing which is of more real importance to the human race than that of writing...should be taught to every child just as writing is.

Were you here in the bad old days? ... That's why you can't read and write then!

Read as much as you possibly can. Nothing will help you as much as reading.

A lamp can only light another lamp when it continues to burn in its own flame.

writing is the loneliest job in the world. There's always that frustrating chasm to bridge between the concept and the writing of it. We're a harassed tribe, we writers.

Reading the word and learning how to write the word so one can later read it are preceded by learning how to write the world, that is having the experience of changing the world and touching the world.

Reading, writing, teaching, learning, are all activities aimed at introducing civilizations to each other.

There are a lot of smart people being really thoughtful and writing really interesting things, but that isn't what I want to do. It's never felt like what I've been called to do. And I have to risk sounding really arrogant when I say that because I've gone to Ivy League schools and been privileged in all these ways in the world of ideas, but I'm not as smart as you think. I'm not really depending on what I learned in college to write my books. Those were just parts of my life experience.

I once heard a learned man say, "Every evil has its remedy, except folly. To reprimand an obstinate fool or to preach to a dolt is like writing upon the water. Christ healed the blind, the halt, the palsied, and the leprous. But the fool He could not cure."

I just loved storytelling. That's what I thought I would end up doing. I thought I would probably go to school and end up writing for a magazine or something.

I never lose sight of the fact that before I was a writer, I was a teacher. I still am. My classroom's just gotten a little bigger.

Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.

Don't write naughty words on the wall if you can't spell!

I think also people in states like Pennsylvania know that a lot of money and effort and time needs to be spent on knitting America back together, on the bridges and the roads and the infrastructure and the education.

Transmitting information is easier than creating understanding.

"Whom are you?" said he, for he had been to night school.

We do not write what we know; we write what we want to find out.