Paul Graham

We don’t have to go that far to sell our beer because our immediate accounts sell so much. Places that sold 10 cases before, now they’re selling 30.

I suppose I should learn Lisp, but it seems so foreign.

A programming language is for thinking about programs, not for expressing programs you’ve already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen.

Dressing up is inevitably a substitute for good ideas. It is no coincidence that technically inept business types are known as ‘suits’.

For the most ambitious young people, the corporate ladder is obsolete.

Everyone by now presumably knows about the danger of premature optimization. I think we should be just as worried about premature design – designing too early what a program should do.

Small-business customers are very conservative and very cheap. We don’t have to explain ourselves for the most part.