Quotes by Paul Graham

• Dressing up is inevitably a substitute for good ideas. It is no coincidence that technically inept business types are known as 'suits'.
• 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.
• 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.
• For the most ambitious young people, the corporate ladder is obsolete.
• I suppose I should learn Lisp, but it seems so foreign.
• 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.
• Small-business customers are very conservative and very cheap. We don't have to explain ourselves for the most part.
• Success is like a parking lot: sometimes you just have to circle around until a space opens up.
• Success is like a fart; it only matters to you. Everyone else just thinks it stinks.