Paul Graham > Quotes

“There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating college student.”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“Being strong-willed is not enough, however. You also have to be hard on yourself. Someone who was strong-willed but self-indulgent would not be called determined. Determination implies your willfulness is balanced by discipline.”
― Paul Graham

“If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn't get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid.”
― Paul Graham

“At every period of history, people have believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you risked ostracism or even violence by saying otherwise. If our own time were any different, that would be remarkable. As far as I can tell it isn't.”
― Paul Graham

“If you want to make money at some point, remember this, because this is one of the reasons startups win. Big companies want to decrease the standard deviation of design outcomes because they want to avoid disasters. But when you damp oscillations, you lose the high points as well as the low. This is not a problem for big companies, because they don't win by making great products. Big companies win by sucking less than other big companies. ”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“It's important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It's all-encompassing, like life, but it isn't the real thing. It's only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you're still in it.”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“The recipe for great work is: very exacting taste, plus the ability to gratify it.”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“Just fix things that seem broken, regardless of whether it seems likes the problem is important enough to build a company on.”
― Paul Graham

“Dressing up is inevitably a substitute for good ideas. It is no coincidence that techincally inept business types are known as "suits.”
― Paul Graham

“I'm not saying there's no such thing as genius. But if you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right.”
― Paul Graham

“Object-oriented programming offers a sustainable way to write spaghetti code. It lets you accrete programs as a series of patches.”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age

“When Bauhaus designers adopted Sullivan's "form follows function," what they meant was,
form should follow function. And if function is hard enough, form is forced to follow it,
because there is no effort to spare for error.
Wild animals are beautiful because they have hard lives.”
― Paul Graham

“There is all the more reason for startups to write Web-based software now,
because writing desktop software has become a lot less fun.
If you want to write desktop software now you do it on Microsoft's terms,
calling their APIs and working around their buggy OS. And if you manage to write something
that takes off, you may find that you were merely doing market research for Microsoft.”
― Paul Graham

“Someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.”
― Paul Graham

“You can't distinguish your group by doing things that are rational and believing things that are true. If you want to set yourself apart from other people you have to do things that are arbitrary and believe things that are false.”
― Paul Graham

“People who write about politics, whether on the left or the right, have a consistent bias: they take politics seriously.”
― Paul Graham

“Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?

If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think whatever you're told.”
― Paul Graham, Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age