Quotes from Paul Graham

The easy, conversational tone of good writing comes only on the eighth rewrite.

So if you can figure out a way to get in a design war with a company big enough that its software is designed by product managers, they'll never be able to keep up with you. These opportunities are not easy to find, though. It's hard to engage a big company in a design war, just as it's hard to engage an opponent inside a castle in hand-to-hand combat.

In our world, you sink or swim, and there are no excuses.

If you're in a job that feels safe, you are not going to get exceptional, because if there is no danger there is almost certainly no leverage.

When Bauhaus designers adopted Sullivan's form follows function, what they meant was, form should follow function. And if function is hard enough, form is forced to follow it, because there is no effort to spare for error. Wild animals are beautiful because they have hard lives.

Attacking an outsider makes them all insiders.

This is why so many of the best programmers are libertarians. In our world, you sink or swim, and there are no excuses. When those far removed from the creation of wealth — undergraduates, reporters, politicians — hear that the richest 5% of the people have half the total wealth, they tend to think injustice! An experienced programmer would be more likely to think is that all? The top 5% of programmers probably write 99% of the good software.

Always produce.

You have to be able to see things from the user's point of view.

You can go anywhere in books

Just fix things that seem broken, regardless of whether it seems likes the problem is important enough to build a company on.

Keep your identity small.

no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it.

wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALS and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison.

When you're forced to be simple, you're forced to face the real problem. When you can't deliver ornament, you have to deliver substance

Partly because teenagers are still half children, and many children are just intrinsically cruel.

To become more popular, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other popular people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy.

why Europe grew so powerful. Was it something about the geography of Europe? Was it that Europeans are somehow racially superior? Was it their religion? The answer (or at least the proximate cause) may be that the Europeans rode on the crest of a powerful new idea: allowing those who made a lot of money to keep it.

To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire.

Cold War teaches the same lesson as World War II and, for that matter, most wars in recent history. Don't let a ruling class of warriors and politicians squash the entrepreneurs. The same recipe that makes individuals rich makes countries powerful. Let the nerds keep their lunch money, and you rule the world.

A restaurant can afford to serve the occasional burnt dinner. But in technology, you cook one thing and that's what everyone eats. So any difference between what people want and what you deliver is multiplied. You please or annoy customers wholesale. The closer you can get to what they want, the more wealth you generate.

A great programmer, on a roll, could create a million dollars worth of wealth in a couple weeks. A mediocre programmer over the same period will generate zero or even neg- ative wealth (e.g. by introducing bugs). This is why so many of the best programmers are libertarians.

In England, at least, corruption only became unfashionable (and in fact only started to be called "corruption") when there started to be other, faster ways to get rich.

learn to program by looking at good programs — not just at what they do, but at the source code.