"“WHAT'S WRONG WITH ASSHOLES, BABY? YOU'VE GOT AN ASSHOLE, I'VE GOT AN ASSHOLE! YOU GO TO THE STORE AND BUY A PORTERHOUSE STEAK, THAT HAD AN ASSHOLE! ASSHOLES COVER THE EARTH! IN A WAY TREES HAVE ASSHOLES BUT YOU CAN'T FIND THEM, THEY JUST DROP THEIR LEAVES. YOUR ASSHOLE, MY ASSHOLE, THE WORLD IS FULL OF BILLIONS OF ASSHOLES. THE PRESIDENT HAS AN ASSHOLE, THE CARWASH BOY HAS AN ASSHOLE, THE JUDGE AND THE MURDERER HAVE ASSHOLES . . . EVEN THE PURPLE STICKINPIN HAS AN ASSHOLE!”"

"Are you saying it's too loud? It's got to be loud. You're supposed to feel it all over."

"Just try and downpick as much as he does and you'll quickly realize your puny skills stand no chance against James."

"It had to be something real bad. I think he stole music online."

"All the drinking and all the other junk that I was stuck in... It was so predictable. So boring. I wake up the next day - somewhere, in some bed, I don't know who this person is next to me... and I'm drunk, competely hung over and have a show to do. The result is the same... When life now is pretty... exciting. You don't know what's gonna happen."

"Everybody is born good and everybody has got the same size soul. We're here to connect with that."

"If I hadn't have had music in my life, it's quite possible I could be in here. Or nor even in here, be dead — and I'd much rather be alive."

"Dying, dying, someone told me just recently, dying is easy. Living is hard. for everyone."

"Lars would talk his way into their pants. Kirk had a babyface that was appealing to the girls. And Cliff; he had a big dick. Word got around about that, I guess."

"I like playing music because it's a good living and I get satisfaction from it. But I can't feed my family with satisfaction."

"I didn't plan on rock 'n' roll. I wanted to learn jazz; I got to know some people doing rock 'n' roll with jazz, and I thought I could make money playing music. In rock 'n' roll you can realize anything that you can in jazz or anything. There's no limitation other than the beat. You have more freedom than you do in anything except jazz — which is dying — as far as making any money is concerned."

"In The Doors we have both musicians and poets, and both know of each other's art, so we can effect a synthesis. In the case of Tim Buckley or Dylan you have one man's ideas. Most groups today aren't groups. In a true group all the members create the arrangements among themselves."

"You know that it would be untrue You know that I would be a liar If I was to say to you Girl, we couldn't get much higher. Come on baby, light my fire — Come on baby, light my fire — Try to set the night on fire."

"In private, you got what you got in public. He treated everyone the same. He was just a very warm man, and he worked hard to impress upon his children the value of kindness. He was biologically incapable of gossip. There was no smallness in him."

"Limbaugh hasn't had a natural erection since the Nixon Administration; think he's compensating for something? Now, I wouldn't pick on him for any of this stuff, not his blubbiness, not his man-boobs, not his inability to have a natural erection -- none of that stuff -- to me, off limits until! until! -- Mr. Limbaugh, you turn that sort of gun on somebody else -- once you start doing that, you're fair game, fat boy. Absolutely, you jiggly pile of mess. You're just fair game, and you're going to get it, too. [Laughs] You'd better watch what you say, Limbaugh, because it can come back the other way."

"If you are going to call yourself a Christian—and I don't—then you have to ask yourself a fundamental question, and that is: Whom would Jesus torture? Whom would Jesus drag around on a dog's leash? How can Christians tolerate it? It is unconscionable. It has put our young men and women who are over there, fighting a war that they should not have been asked to fight— it has put them in greater danger."

"I would be unelectable. I'm an atheist. As we all know, that is something people won't accept."

"When you hear music, after it's over, it's gone in the air. You can never capture it again."

"[On the question "Is bird imitation valid in jazz?"] I don’t know if it's valid in jazz, [...] but I enjoy it. It somehow comes in as part of the development of what I'm doing. Sometimes I can't do it. At home [in California] I used to play, and the birds always used to whistle with me. I would stop what I was working on and play with the birds."

"We take pleasure in watching an athlete break a record, hearing a soprano in full flight, or reading a philosopher of depth and insight. Human accomplishment is the ultimate spectator sport. Apply as much historical analysis to it as we wish, and we’ll not unlock all its mysteries. The continuous capacity of genius to surpass understanding remains a human constant."

"I suppose you could switch grammars once you've seen 'use strict subs'."

"As for whether Perl 6 will replace Perl 5, yeah, probably, in about 40 years or so."

"Easy things should be easy, and hard things should be possible."

"Jesse Vincent: My dog is Web 2.0. Prove me wrong. Larry: Does your dog have a long tail? Damian Conway: If you enjoyed these practices, find 245 more like this in this book. Larry: Does your dog have a long tail?"

"When's the last time you used duct tape on a duct?"

"Larry's 2nd Law of Language Redesign: Larry gets the colon."

"…I also discovered Larry's First Law of Language Redesign: Everyone wants the colon."

"There's really no way to fix this and still keep Perl pathologically eclectic."

"The problem with being consistent is that there are lots of ways to be consistent, and they're all inconsistent with each other."

"The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris."

"...Then you start building things like the Berlin wall to keep people inside your community. In anthropological terms, that's tribalism. A tribal Perl programmer might say, "If you leave the Perl tribe to go and join the Python tribe, we will hunt you down, cook you, and eat you." Or if you join the Ruby tribe, you will explode. By and large, I am not in favor of tribalism. Except for my tribe, of course."

"[Boxed] Multiple bouncing balls in a box are a metaphor for community. Notice how the escaping balls explode. This is what happens to people who move from Perl to Ruby."

"The only reason I've managed to run this open source project, is that I have learned to delegate even the delegation to other people. (final words of the video)."

"As a linguist, I don't think of Ada as a big language. Now, English and Japanese, those are big languages. Ada is just a medium-sized language."

"Is LISP a candidate for a scripting language? While you can certainly write things rapidly in it, I cannot in good conscience call LISP a scripting language. By policy, LISP has never really catered to mere mortals... And, of course, mere mortals have never really forgiven LISP for not catering to them."

"But you could do extreme programming. In fact, I had a college buddy I did pair programming with. We took a compiler writing class together and studied all that fancy stuff from the dragon book. Then of course the professor announced we would be implementing our own language, called PL/0. After thinking about it a while, we announced that we were going to do our project in BASIC. The professor looked at us like we were insane. Nobody else in the class was using BASIC. And you know what? Nobody else in the class finished their compiler either. We not only finished but added I/O extensions, and called it PL 0.5. That's rapid prototyping."

"I started out as a BASIC programmer. Some people would say that I'm permanently damaged. Some people are undoubtedly right... But I'm not going to apologize for that. All language designers have their occasional idiosyncracies. I'm just better at it than most."

"Suppose you went back to Ada Lovelace and asked her the difference between a script and a program. She'd probably look at you funny, then say something like: Well, a script is what you give the actors, but a program is what you give the audience. That Ada was one sharp lady..."

"There are a lotta computer languages out there doing drugs."

"If there's a particular problem that Perl is trying to solve, it's the basic fact that all programming languages suck. Sort of the concept of original sin, applied to programming languages."

"How do you type it? With your keyboard."

"Now, I'm not the only language designer with irrationalities. You can think of some languages to go with some of these things."

"I simultaneously believe that languages are wonderful and awful. You have to hold both of those. Ugly things can be beautiful. And beautiful can get ugly very fast. You know, take Lisp. You know, it's the most beautiful language in the world. At least up until Haskell came along. (laughter) But, you know, every program in Lisp is just ugly. I don't figure how that works."

"So... Perhaps the Perl 6 slogan should be "All Your Paradigms Are Belong To Us". We'll get to that."

"And C was good at something I like to call manipulexity, that is the manipulation of complex things. While shell was good at something else which I call whipuptitude, the aptitude for whipping things up."

"But I'm not here to talk about postmodernism. I tried to do that last spring, and afterwards I was thoroughly deconstructed by the deconstructionists for attempting to deconstruct deconstructionism. At least, that's the construction I put on their construction of it. I was talking about postmodern culture, and they thought I was talking about postmodern literature. Not at all the same thing!"

"People understand instinctively that the best way for computer programs to communicate with each other is for each of the them to be strict in what they emit, and liberal in what they accept. The odd thing is that people themselves are not willing to be strict in how they speak, and liberal in how they listen. You'd think that would also be obvious. Instead, we're taught to express ourselves."

"When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi."

"The previous line contains the naughty word '$&'.\n if /(ibm|apple|awk)/; # :-)"

"The autodecrement is not magical."