"My dad has sometimes felt that I grew up a little lacking in sufficient eccentricity - in the sense that I'm willing to live as an adult in a house with walls that are parallel to each other, that sort of thing."

"My parents were kind of like me in that they had tons and tons of weird, amazing stuff."

"I feel drawn to experiment with ways that technology can interact with notions of intimacy, because so much of technology is done in a way that's very cold and has such an opposite effect."

"Web 2.0 ideas have a chirpy, cheerful rhetoric to them, but I think they consistently express a profound pessimism about humans, human nature and the human future."

"Whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do it well whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself completely in great aims and in small I have always thoroughly been in earnest."

"In more than 20 years I've spent studying the issue, I have yet to hear a convincing argument that college football has anything do with what is presumably the primary purpose of higher education: academics."

"A journalist and an information architect face exactly the same problem - how to give shape to the pile of information in front of you in a way that will make it easy and natural for people to comprehend. I can't imagine any better preparation for the work I do now."

"An ethical person ought to do more than he's required to do and less than he's allowed to do."