Quotes from Paul Allen

I have had some amazing experiences as a musician - even with my modest skills.

I'm on Twitter, and I have over 10,000 followers. Which is pretty modest compared to Charlie Sheen.

My mother, God bless her, forced me to take touch typing when I was 16.

Nobody really knows what it would take to create something that is self-aware or has a personality. I guess I could imagine a day when perhaps, if we can understand how it works in the human brain, which is unbelievably complicated, it could be possible.

As a species, we've always been discoverers and adventurers, and space and the deep ocean are some of the last frontiers.

I was in a town of about 10,000 people, and a shipping container with a rusty microscope was their medical clinic.

Microprocessors were instantly attractive to us because you could build something for a fraction of the cost of conventional electronics. That's essentially what we did with the Traf-O-Data computer - only it was too narrow and challenging an area to try to build a service business in.

Our dream is to one day uncover the essence of what makes us human.

I have to admit, between the Seahawks games and the Blazer games and playoffs games, we're talking about close to 100 games a year, so I don't really follow other sports a lot.

Any time you get to compete for the championship in a professional spot, it's just a magic thing.

I grew up watching games with my father at Washington Husky Stadium. When I moved out to Seattle, I had a friend who would take me to Seahawks games in the 1980s.

Moore's Law-based technology is so much easier than neuroscience. The brain works in such a different way from the way a computer does.

The computer is a very regular structure. It's very uniform. It's got a bunch of memory, and it's got a little element that computes bits of memory and combines them with each other and puts them back somewhere. It's a very simple thing.

In the university library my father helped lead, as the Associate Director of Libraries from '60 to '82, I spent hours and hours as a kid devouring piles of books so I could follow the latest advances in science.

I was only in second grade when the Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space. The night of his launch - April 12, 1961 - I went out onto the front porch and stared up at the stars, trying to see his capsule passing overhead. Like millions of others, I was enthralled by the idea of space exploration and have been ever since.

Vulcan Inc. is a unique organization that unites commercial, philanthropic, research, policy, and technology innovation. Our goals are ambitious - from saving Africa's elephants to unlocking the secrets of the human brain to building sustainable communities and opening up access to space.

There are so many intricacies to our brain that won't be understood unless we start to look at the system as a whole. All these different details don't operate in isolation.

Some people are motivated by a need for recognition, some by money, and some by a broad social goal. I start from a different place: from the love of ideas and the urge to put them into motion and see where they might lead.

There are people out there who don't see value in intellectual property, and so they're always going to have a problem if there are lawsuits involving intellectual property.

As a programmer, you're working with very simple structures compared to the brain. So I was always fascinated by how the brain works.

To make real progress in A.I., we have to overcome the big challenges in the area of common sense.

In Seattle, I've talked about how Pete Carroll is such... I'm kind of surprised at the variety of styles that successful coaches can have. Some are very communicative and positive and energized - like, Pete Carroll has all that in spades. Some of them are more cerebral; some are more directive.

My quest to expand access to space began more than a decade ago, when I teamed up with Burt Rutan at Scaled Composites to build SpaceShipOne. This innovative air-launched vehicle was the world's first private spacecraft to carry an astronaut into sub-orbital space.

Some people can vent their anger, take a breath, and let it go, but I wasn't one of them.