Mr. Carmack Quotes

The Xbox 360 is the first console that I've ever worked with that actually has development tools that are better for games than what we've had on PC.

Programming is not a zero-sum game. Teaching something to a fellow programmer doesn't take it away from you. I'm happy to share what I can, because I'm in it for the love of programming.

Note to self: Pasty-skinned programmers ought not stand in the Mojave desert for multiple hours.

Focus is a matter of deciding what things you're not going to do.

Rocket science has been mythologized all out of proportion to its true difficulty.

Sometimes, the elegant implementation is just a function. Not a method. Not a class. Not a framework. Just a function.

The speed of light sucks.

If you're willing to restrict the flexibility of your approach, you can almost always do something better

I'd rather have a search engine or a compiler on a deserted island than a game.

If you aren't sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.

I recognize that I possess a very special intellect, but at the same time, I recognize that I'm lacking in a lot of areas. But being well-rounded is greatly overrated.

It's nice to have a game that sells a million copies.

It is difficult to make good scalable use of a CPU like you can of a graphics card. You certainly don't want 'better or worse' physics or AI in your game

It is not that uncommon for the cost of an abstraction to outweigh the benefit it delivers. Kill one today!

Focused, hard work is the real key to success.

One of the big lessons of a big project is you don't want people that aren't really programmers programming, you'll suffer for it!

Low-level programming is good for the programmer's soul.

I like taking things apart and putting them back together. Tinkering. I'd be a professional tinkerer. Tinkerbell. I think that's what they're called.

An interesting question: is it easier to motivate a learned individual that never does anything, or educate an ignorant individual that actually produces things?

Because of the nature of Moore's law, anything that an extremely clever graphics programmer can do at one point can be replicated by a merely competent programmer some number of years later.

Making one brilliant decision and a whole bunch of mediocre ones isn't as good as making a whole bunch of generally smart decisions throughout the whole process.

At its best, entertainment is going to be a subjective thing that can't win for everyone, while at worst, a particular game just becomes a random symbol for petty tribal behavior.

Everybody's saturated with the marketing hype of next-generation consoles. They are wonderful, but the truth is that they are as powerful as a high end PC is right now.

It's a good thing Doom 3 is selling very well.

In terms of hardline right-wing people on television, there's some people that make me cringe when I change the channel.

Success has a lot of different plateaus. But I first felt really proud of myself when I was doing an off-Broadway production in New York City.

You can prematurely optimize maintainability, flexibility, security, and robustness just like you can performance.

I wanted to remain a technical adviser for Id, but it just didn't work out. Probably for the best, as the divided focus was challenging.

I like to think I'm pretty good at what I do.

I feel like the internet also affects originality a lot, because music is so easily shared nowadays, it seems like artists have collectively explored most of the grounds that music has to offer.

Sometimes artists can have the same sound, but they can give you a show that makes you see it in a completely different way.

A career like mine as an actor has a lot of ups and downs. Sometimes you wonder if you're not wasting your time trying to carve out a space for yourself in this crazy entertainment industry.

I've been writing songs on little pieces of paper since I was a little kid, and it's just always been something I've done.

Music kept me sane between acting jobs.

I really do love the theater and as you get deeper into your career, it gets harder to carve out the time to do theater.

I have a couple of nice guitars that I use, but I don't have anything that I collect. I collect a lot of dust in my apartment, if that counts for anything.

I think I was a pretty energetic kid. Well, I was energetic until about my mid-20s when I discovered alcohol. That's not entirely true, but you get older and the edge comes off.

I don't want to go to the future. I'm scared of the future!

Being an assistant in a computer lab was the worst job I ever had. It was boring. That was when I was in college.

Each one you take is a commitment. If you break that commitment, the gods of alcohol will punish you with a hangover so bad you'll think Satan himself took a dump on you. -Milo

I get what it's like to want something, but to try and force yourself to really believe that you don't.

Everything in the world might be connected, but that doesn't mean the way we feel about them has to be.

Because try as I might, perfect doesn't guarantee me anything. I can't control whether other people will want me or love me or even like me. I can only control how I feel about myself.

I will call bullshit on that so many times that the word bullshit will lose all meaning. -Milo

The timbre of his voice went into that low register that made my insides curl in on themselves--it was like my uterus was tapping out a happy dance on the rest of my organs.

Do me a favor? Be a gentleman tomorrow?

Even the good things from our pasts still only belonged in the past

Tell me I'm not crazy, " He said. I couldn't do that. I was nowhere near sane enough at the moment to advise anyone else on rational behavior.

She said she wanted my best line tomorrow after the show, and now I knew what it was going to be.

Pain changes us. Mine made me want to be perfect, so that no one would ever want to leave me again.