It had to happen to me sometime: sooner or later, I would have to lose sight of the cutting edge. That moment every technical person fears - the fall into knowledge exhaustion, obsolescence, techno-fuddy-duddyism - there was no reason to think I could escape it forever.

The condition of my personal workspace is my own business, as I see it.

With all the attention given to the personal computer, it's hard to remember that other companion machine in the room - the printer.

A computer is not really like us. It is a projection of a very small part of ourselves: that portion devoted to logic, order, rule and clarity.

Our Constitution is designed to change very slowly. It's a feature, not a bug.

Staring prejudice in the face imposes a cruel discipline: to structure your anger, to achieve a certain dignity, an angry dignity.

I like the little semi-competencies of human beings, I realize. Governance, after all, is a messy business, a world of demi-solutions and compromise, where ideals are tarnished regularly.

Human thinking can skip over a great deal, leap over small misunderstandings, can contain ifs and buts in untroubled corners of the mind. But the machine has no corners. Despite all the attempts to see the computer as a brain, the machine has no foreground or background.

I think many people have wonderful stories inside them and the talent to tell those stories. But the writing life, with its isolation and uncertain outcomes, keeps most from the task.

My approach to being a self-taught programmer was to find out who was smart and who would be helpful, and these were - these are both men and women. And without learning from my co-workers, I never could've gone on in the profession as long as I did.

Abhorring error is not necessarily positive.

I am not intimidated by puerile boys acting like pre-teens.

You can only get a beginner's mind once.

With every advance, you have to look over your shoulder and know what you're giving up - look over your shoulder and look at what falls away.

When I am writing, and occasionally achieve single focus and presence, I finally feel that is where I'm supposed to be. Everything else is kind of anxiety.

I was a girl who came into the clubhouse, into the treehouse, with the sign on the door saying, 'No girls allowed,' and the reception was not always a good one.

It will not work to keep asking men to change. Many have no real objective to do so. There's no reward for them. Why should they change? They're doing well inside the halls of coding.

What happens to people like myself, who have been involved with computing for a long time, is that you begin to see how many of the 'new' ideas are simply old ones coming back into view on the swing of the pendulum, with new and faster hardware to back it up.

Truly new inventions take time to play out.

I don't know where anyone ever got the idea that technology, in and of itself, was a savior. Like all human-created 'progress,' computers are problematic, giving and taking away.

The questions I am often asked about my career tend to concentrate not on how one learns to code but how a woman does.

When you lose your Visa card, you get a new card with a new number, and any new charges with the old number are blocked. Why can't we do the same with Social Security numbers?

No one in the government is seriously penalized when Social Security numbers are stolen and misused; only the number-holders suffer.

I'm pretty bad at crying.

When I am around people I most admire, I tend to hug the wall.

Writing is a very isolating occupation.

Closed environments dominated the computing world of the 1970s and early '80s. An operating system written for a Hewlett-Packard computer ran only on H.P. computers; I.B.M. controlled its software from chips up to the user interfaces.

My mother told me that my birth mother got pregnant by a married man who didn't want to leave his wife.

Even simple fixes can bring the whole system down.

I fear for the world the Internet is creating.

What I hope is that those with the knowledge of the humanities break into the closed society where code gets written: invade it.

The world of programmers is not going to change on its own.

When I hear the word 'disruption,' in my mind, I think of all these people in the middle who were earning a living. We will sweep away all that money they were earning, and we will move that to the people at the top.

I'm in no way saying that women can't take a tough code review. I'm saying that no one should have to take one in a boy-puerile atmosphere.

It is one thing for an artist to experiment on a canvas, but it's entirely different to experiment on a living creature.

People imagine that programming is logical, a process like fixing a clock. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The brain is plastic, continuously changing its organization.

Software and digital devices are imbued with the values of their creators.

I won't use Twitter. Twitter posts are thought-farts. I don't care about unconsidered thoughts of the moment.

Some people hit a profession and just keep going deeper into it, making a life and making it more and more stable. That's not been my experience. I always want to try something new.

With code, what it means is what it does. It doesn't express, not really. It's a very bounded conversation. And writing is not bounded. That's what's hard about it.

I think storytelling in general is how we really deeply know things. It's ancient.

It has occurred to me that if people really knew how software got written, I'm not sure they'd give their money to a bank or get on an airplane ever again.

The computer's there to serve the human being, not vice versa.

We don't have to live up to our computer.

People talk about computer programmers as if computers are our whole lives. That's simply not true.

It is deep in our nature to make tools.

Our relationship to the computer is much like our relationship to the car: rich, complex, socially messy.

Evolution, dismissed as a sloppy programmer, has seen fit to create us as a wild amalgam of everything that came before us: except for the realm of insects, the whole history of life on earth is inscribed within our bodies.

The web is just another stunning point in the two-hundred-thousand-year history of human beings on earth. The taming of fire; the discovery of penicillin; the publication of 'Jane Eyre' - add anything you like.