Paul Graham Quotes

The reason I use vi instead of emacs is because when I got to grad school and tried to save a file on a Sun workstation, it froze the screen instead. It took me a couple days to find out what keys they'd remapped the save command to. In the meantime I started using vi.

Data is ideology's headwind.

Before Twitter, people used to send angry messages called "hate mail" to (usually) famous people they were mad at. Now when they get mad at someone, they send messages to all their friends.

Editors aren't intrinsic to writing. They're just an artifact of how the publishing business works.

The biggest sleight of hand in essay writing is cramming tree-shaped ideas into linear form.

(Endnotes help a lot. They force those branches to be compressed, but the result can sometimes be pleasing in the same way gatehouses are.)

A significant part of what YC partners do in office hours is to shake loose insights that founders already have.

If you skip some or all of college to start a startup, it's on you to develop your mind the way college would have. And that's not something that happens by default in most startups.

Any book that was required reading in an English class has been thereby spoilt for me. This is not true for classes in other subjects though.

Humans are so bizarrely specific, dogs must think. They encourage us to eat this dogfood, and freak out when we eat poop or dead animals. It's so much work keeping track of what's allowed.

One good thing about habitually taking super long to write things is that you don't slow down noticeably as you age.

Experienced and inexperienced investors both lead you on, but for different reasons. Inexperienced ones get excited, then get cold feet, and the result is as if they were leading you on. Whereas experienced but unscrupulous investors deliberately act more excited than they are.

Trying to make something timeless is like thinking about follow-through when kicking a football. In theory it shouldn't matter what happens to your foot after the ball leaves it. But in practice thinking about where your foot will be later makes you put it in the right place now.

It doesn't feel laborious to go over every sentence in an essay 50 times. The mistakes in early drafts irritate me so much that it would be hard to stop trying to eliminate them.

It seems unlikely to be a coincidence that prim, prig, and prude all begin with pr. There's something censorious about pr the same way there's something slippery about sl.

While I believe that AI is a powerful and useful tool, I think the rules against aigiarism should be roughly similar to those against plagiarism.