Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson.

UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.

The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it.

Unix has retarded OS research by 10 years and linux has retarded it by 20.

C was already implemented on several quite different machines and OSs, Unix was already being distributed on the PDP-11, but the portability of the whole system was new

C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.

C++ and Java, say, are presumably growing faster than plain C, but I bet C will still be around.

For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.

A language that doesn't have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do

... with proper design, the features come cheaply. This approach is arduous, but continues to succeed.

I'm not a person who particularly had heros when growing up.

To know what you know and what you do not know, that is true knowledge.

Even the worst feeling, with time and familiarity, became tolerable.

True freedom is not about being able to do whatever we feel like doing; rather, it is about being able to do what we truly want to do, in spite of what we feel like doing at the moment.

Laughter is higher than all pain.

Frequently a big advantage can be gained by knowing how to give in at the right moment.

Why? is the boy's motto, why does, why is, why not? Food, weather, time, fires, sea and season, clothes and cars and people; it's all grist to the mill of why.

Yet only when we come to understand, in the light of the Cross, the evil we are capable of, and have even been a part of, can we experience true remorse and true repentance.

Going out to eat is expensive. I was out at one restaurant and they didn't have prices on the menu. Just faces with different expressions of horror.

Happiness is a way of travelling and not a final destination.

Pour out wine till I become a wanderer from myself; for in selfhood and existence I have felt only fatigue.