Brian Kernighan Quotes

Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

Brian Kernighan

• Writing
• Clever

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Quotes to Explore

• Once you research an idea, you begin to develop a perspective. Writing about anything in public, often in real time, has helped fashion my views.

  

  Barry Ritholtz
  • Time
  • Writing
  • Real

• You put anyone in the outfit, and they look like Gandalf. Not that clever.

  

  Ian Mckellen
  • You
  • Look
  • Clever

• I've got plenty of quirks. I go to an office early in the morning. Early in the morning is really good writing time. I take anywhere between six to eight showers a day. I'm not exaggerating. I'm not a germaphobe: it's all about a fresh start.

  

  Aaron Sorkin
  • Time
  • Good
  • Writing

• Writing 'William Shakespeare's Star Wars' was a fun exercise in mixing just the right amount of the Bard with just the right amount of everyone's favorite galaxy far, far away.

  

  Ian Doescher
  • Writing
  • Fun
  • Star

• I taught English and history, so my education for that really helped prepare me for writing historical fiction.

  

  Candace Camp
  • Writing
  • History
  • Education

• It takes me a long time writing books. It takes me about five years to write a book, and when I'm done, the last thing I want to do is to do it again.

  

  Naomi Klein
  • Time
  • Long
  • Writing

• I like the performing. And interviews, even. And the stuff that's not sitting in a room by yourself with empty paper. But I never loved writing, to tell you the truth.

  

  Randy Newman
  • Writing
  • Truth
  • Yourself

• I am just doing photo shoots. It's not something that extraordinary. I'm not a great artist, I'm not writing books, I'm not a painter, and people in the streets ask me for a picture or a note, and I say, 'Why?'

  

  Carine Roitfeld
  • People
  • Great
  • Writing

• I don't talk about Amy Winehouse as a 'singer.' She's a pioneer. I listened to her endlessly when I started writing.

  

  Laura Mvula
  • Writing
  • Talk
  • Singer

• I love writing songs.

  

  Sade Adu
  • Writing
  • Love
  • Songs

• Hard writing makes easy reading.

  

  Wallace Stegner
  • Writing
  • Reading
  • Easy

• Very often, writing a song is a process that happens to me rather than one that I instigate. I feel a song coming on and, like a sneeze; I wait for it until it comes.

  

  Kat Edmonson
  • Writing
  • Song
  • Process

• I wasn't one of those kids who grew up wanting to write or who read a particular book and thought: 'I want to do that!' I always told stories and wrote them down, but I never thought writing was a career path, even though, clearly, someone was writing the books and newspapers and magazines.

  

  Gayle Forman
  • Up
  • Writing
  • Book

• I've been writing fiction probably since I was about 6 years old, so it's something that is second nature to me now. I just sit down and start writing. I don't sit down and start writing and it comes out perfectly - it's a process.

  

  Candace Bushnell
  • Writing
  • Nature
  • Start

• I am a great procrastinator. When the writing is going really well, the laundry piles up.

  

  Dana Spiotta
  • Great
  • Writing
  • Procrastinator

• There's a rule of writing: if everything is funny, nothing is funny; if everything is sad, nothing is sad. You want that contrast.

  

  J. Michael Straczynski
  • Writing
  • Funny
  • Sad

• Writing does produce a very unique satisfaction. There are times when I'm writing that it's frustrating or appalling or difficult, but when it goes well, it goes really well, and there is a feeling of rightness, like I'm doing the thing I was meant to do, almost in a mystical way, like I'm at an appropriate angle to the world.

  

  Rachel Kushner
  • World
  • Writing
  • Feeling

• Just as I could tell you about my first Andre Norton novel or my first L'Engle or my first Asimov, I could write a paragraph about how each of these writers influenced me, my writing, and my thoughts, and do to this day.

  

  Pamela Dean
  • Writing
  • Day
  • Thoughts

• When I was in advertising, I did a great deal of work on television commercials. A co-worker and I wrote a screenplay, which led to a few more screenplays, and some were optioned by production companies. I was advised to move to California but didn't want to make the move. I decided to use another form of storytelling, so I wrote a novel.

  

  M. J. Rose
  • Work
  • Great
  • California

• So many things for me are unfortunate in the commercialization of something that is special. It's like when Led Zeppelin appears in Cadillac commercials. There's something that is taken away from your love of this thing and your connection to it.

  

  Chris Carter
  • Taken
  • Connection

• I'm not different for the sake of being different, only for the desperate sake of being myself. I can't join your gang: you'd think I was a phony and I'd know it.

  

  Vivian Stanshall
  • Different
  • Thinking
  • Gang

• The streets made me. They stay at me. There's nothing that's gonna take away from my legacy. I'm sorry. It is what it is. I'm dying this way. With the crown on my head, nobody can take nothing away from me. It is what it is. I am who I am. Bottom line.

  

  Lil' Kim
  • Dying
  • Sorry
  • Legacy

• The fact that I was taking naps in churches, in between takes of the [Ordinary World], and there was that guerilla style of filmmaking, I felt more at home with that.

  

  Billie Joe Armstrong Green Day
  • World
  • Home
  • Style

• Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

  

  Brian Kernighan
  • Writing
  • Clever