I am very scared of wasps; my cousin was stung in the eye once.

I didn't want to be a genius! That ain't cool.

I remember, in school, writing Janet Jackson and Michael Jackson and asking them to come get me out of class. I would imagine them running down the hall and asking my teacher, 'Ms. Daniels, can we get Missy out of class? We're here to see Missy.'

Music is a male-dominated field.

I ain't no icon. It's people like Patti LaBelle, somebody like that's an icon. I'm just Missy. I'm just crazy, that's all.

I have to respect her family, and until they come and say, 'We're ready to do an Aaliyah album,' then I don't really want to come and try to get into that because that's very sensitive.

A lot of times, I walk down the street and listen to people argue, and then I write a song about it.

You don't make any money being an artist. Writing and producing? You get your money from that. You live comfortable.

The fun part of being an entertainer is that you call up Six Flags, and you say, 'I'm coming,' and you get to get on all the rides before everyone. I hate standing in line.

Especially when the expectations become so high of you, you always remember the last record that might have been really successful, and you're trying to outdo that or trying to make something that does not sound like the last record.

I always feel the need to work as if I don't have a deal, because that's what's going to keep me around for a long time.

My father was very abusive, and it was hard for my mother at first to leave because we had depended on him for so long. Sometimes you kind of get adjusted to getting that beating.

I do Dance Dance Revolution. I'm not as good as the little kids that come in the arcade. Their little feet go crazy fast. I'm not that fast, but I'm good on it!

It feels different.... When hip-hop was beginning for me, people weren't making the kind of money that they make now. It was for the love of doing it and having fun with it.

It could be hectic sometimes when you're being an artist and running a label at the same time. But there are times when you just have to say that this my time period to work on my stuff, and then you say this is the time to concentrate on my artists.

No matter what I'm doing for myself or someone else, I'm constantly writing and working on other people's albums.

I believe that tracks speak to me. Some tracks make me write certain music or make me feel sad or inspire me to write a sad love song. Each track has its feeling to me.

Its funny, because for females in general - not just in music, but the corporate ladder as well - anything we do has always been harder for us. When it comes to music, the industry wants you to conform, to look like this and to sound like this and do this or that. It makes it harder. It's harder for us to come out and be bosses and lead the pack.

All of the trials and tribulations from personal to the artist. It shows that I'm human. People see the glamorous stuff, but they don't see the background.

A lot of people don't know that before the artist, I wanted to be a writer and producer. That's always been a love of mine. Its easy for me to do it on myself, but it's fun to create for someone else.

What I love about Kanye is that he doesn't fit the mould either. He does what he feels.

I don't just throw out microwave records.

Things happen in your life, and then you can write something else instead of the same three topics - like, how many times can we write about the clubs?

When I create something, it's got to be special, and it can't just be to throw something out there because I feel like I'm Missy.

I got to feel like what I'm giving the fans is 100 percent and that it's game-changing.

Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.

What is design? It's where you stand with a foot in two worlds - the world of technology and the world of people and human purposes - and you try to bring the two together.

Human intelligence is a marvelous, subtle, and poorly understood phenomenon. There is no danger of duplicating it anytime soon.

Inside every working anarchy, there's an Old Boy Network.

Hackers are seen as shadowy figures with superhuman powers that threaten civilization.

It became clear to me by 1984 that Microsoft was likely going to be the big winner in the PC software apps and operating system category, partly because of the dynamics of owning and controlling the operating system: that gave you enormous power, and I came to see Bill Gates was fierce competitor.

Architecture is politics.

The accomplishment of open source is that it is the back end of the web, the invisible part, the part that you don't see as a user.

If information wants to be free, then that's true everywhere, not just in information technology.

I give Bill Gates an A for vision because, as a business person and a strategist, he's brilliant. His flaw is that his view is not informed by a humanistic or compassionate vision of how to make computers work for people.

Open source can propagate to fill all the nooks and crannies that people want it to fill.

Life in cyberspace is often conducted in primitive frontier conditions, but it is a life which, at its best, is more egalitarian than elitist and more decentralized than hierarchical. It serves individuals and communities, not mass audiences, and it is extraordinarily multi-faceted in the purposes to which it is put.

I think there is widespread agreement that there is a crisis in public education.

I'd always wanted to live in San Francisco, and my circumstances never permitted it. I'm so happy I made the move.

If advertisers want to decorate their ads to increase their conversions by showing what users think, that's a good thing.

Both VisiCalc and MultiPlan were available when the IBM PC shipped in October 1981. 1-2-3 didn't hit the market until January 1983.

Few industries have the ability to transform society like tech, yet too few companies are asking the questions or working on the problems that would create meaningful social change.

Technology advances at exponential rates, and human institutions and societies do not. They adapt at much slower rates. Those gaps get wider and wider.

StumbleUpon has humanized the Web and mastered a way for people to discover online content by incorporating an individual's personal preferences and recommendations of friends and like-minded people.

For people who know both New York and the Bay Area, it is a complement to say that Oakland is San Francisco's Brooklyn. It's a complement both to Oakland and to Brooklyn. And, if you look at Brooklyn, Brooklyn is hot; Brooklyn is cool.

If you go back to the '50s and '60s... there was zero tech in S.F. It was all in the Valley... and it crept northward in early 2000s.

People are hungry for community. They're hungry for meaning in a society that is oriented around the production and consumption of consumer goods.

I actually built a tiny computer as a junior high school project.

I'm fascinated by management and organizations: how organizations get things done and how successful organizations are built and maintained, how they evolve as they grow from start-ups to small companies to medium companies to big companies.

Every year we are greeted by a host of new apps that will 'change the way we think' about ordering takeout, 'fundamentally transform' our shoe purchases, or 'revolutionize' the way we edit photos.