“What you don't understand you can make mean anything.”

“To neglect your own mind, that's like to neglect your consciousness. That’s like to give up all hope of joy and happiness, really. You're the only one that can discover for you the meaning of anything. What it means to you. By that, I don't mean intellectual meaning. I mean, what it means, how it makes you feel. You have to see whether you really are happy or not. Whether you really are sad or not. And you have to investigate what goes through your mind.”

“What do you mean, 'you don't need to buy it'? You don't need to do anything, except pay taxes and die.”

“Listening doesn't mean trying to understand. Anything, however trifling, may be of use one day. What matters is to know something that others don't know you know.”

“Don't worry about anything. Just do what you can and be the best you can be.”

“To write a novel, you begin with what you can see and then you add what came before and what came after.

… You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it.”

“If you want to make a million you don't have to understand money, what you have to understand is people's fears about money”

“What a queer thing Life is! So unlike anything else, don't you know, if you see what I mean.”

“You don't want to write a big comment that tells others how to make a change they might want to make, because you don't know what change they're going to want to make. Better to have the attitude that you can't help future programmers make their changes. All you can do is make it easy for them to understand what you were trying to do. And it will be easiest for them to understand what you were trying to do if you were very careful to not try to do too much.”

“It's not to pretend you can do everything, but if people like you – in the sense of admiring or having respect for what you are trying to do – then they will understand the odd blemish. If people don't like you, and lack confidence in what you are trying to do, they won't forgive you anything.”