J. Raymond Quotes

What do any of us really know about love?

The smooth stones you pick up and examine under the moon's light have been made blue from the sea. Next morning when you pull them from your trouser pocket, they are still blue.

I am too nervous to eat pie.

[I] browsed far outside science in my reading and attended public lectures - Bertrand Russell, H. G. Wells, Huxley, and Shaw being my favorite speakers.

When a reader finishes a wonderful story and lays it aside, he should have to pause for a minute and collect himself.

You have to have been in love to write poetry.

I’d like to go out in the front yard and shout something. “None of this is worth it!” That’s what I’d like people to hear.

To have one's own story told by a third party who doesn't know that the character in question is himself the hero of the story being told, that's a technical refinement.

The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.

When Ulysses hears his own story sung by an epic poet and then he reveals his identity and the poet wants to continue singing, Ulysses isn't interested any longer. That's very astonishing.

Don't ever write anything you don't like yourself and if you do like it, don't take anyone's advice about changing it. They just don't know.

A very great Iliad... concerns the creation of a nation.

All confessions are Odysseys.

We should imitate the great classics. We would miss, and that miss would be our originality.

Asking what the question is, and why the question is asked, is always asking a pertinent question.

Two very simple rules: A. You don't have to write. B. You can't do anything else The rest comes of itself.

I really don't see any influence of my work on any artists. But I do think I've had an influence on drawings' being shown. I've had an influence on the economics of it.

It's an extreme to go from an artist like myself to a commercial artist with art directors looking over your shoulder, or any other knucklehead telling you what your art should look like.

He sounded like a man who had slept well and didn't owe too much money.

When I see a train, I want to take it in my arms.

I do a great deal of research, especially in the apartments of tall blondes.

My work is more driven by the creative word. It's immersed in other writing and printed work, rather than drawn so much from life or past experience.

Everybody has his own great ideas about what my art should be. But I can do whatever I like and there aren't many constraints to the way I work, whether I'm using a brush with ink or paint.

I appreciate the people there thinking about me, and I look forward to coming back to Paris for that occasion.

Courage is a strange thing: One can never be sure of it

A nice state of affairs when a man has to indulge his vices by proxy.

Neal had a couple of good ideas and they fit nicely, so that's the way I decided to go.

A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.

Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.

Linux evolved in a completely different way. From nearly the beginning, it was rather casually hacked on by huge numbers of volunteers coordinating only through the Internet.

The ARPAnet was the first transcontinental, high-speed computer network.

If Unix could present the same face, the same capabilities, on machines of many different types, it could serve as a common software environment for all of them.

Television is just one more facet of that considerable segment of our society that never had any standard but the soft buck.

They don't want you until you have made a name, and by the time you have made a name, you have developed some kind of talent they can't use. All they will do is spoil it, if you let them.

He (The Agent) just takes ten per cent of your life.

The beginnings of the hacker culture as we know it today can be conveniently dated to 1961, the year MIT acquired the first PDP-1.

Being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer.

If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.

When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.

Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.

The iPhone brand is in worse shape than I thought was even possible. And the implications of that are huge... The iPhone is in deep trouble.

Scientific medicine is one of the greatest triumphs of humankind.

If I leave my computer, I'm probably not going to get back for hours. If I take a few minutes to answer questions and go web surfing, then guilt kicks in and I get back to work.

Now is the dwelling place of God himself.

I know you'll think this odd, but I find it strangely exhilarating not knowing what's coming next.

Every person you encounter, whom you interact with, is there to teach you something. Sometimes it may be years before you realize what each had to show you.

Never accept the proposition that just because a solution satisfies a problem, that it must be the only solution.

If from poetry we expect a succession of signals for the release of miscellaneous private emotion we are likely to find Tears, Idle Tears valuable.

Industrial design keeps the customer happy, his client in the black and the designer busy.

One likes to think one grows as a writer as one ages, else all you get is an old young writer. Beyond that is the changing landscape of the universe and the stories I choose to tell.