Script in television is easier: you can study it and do your homework. When doing “Kim’s,” I’m often three days ahead of schedule, learning my lines and making choices because I have the luxury of an almost complete script in front of me. It’s different from doing a television show that’s improvised and ad-libbed; basically what you are saying is predicated by what the competitors do. As a host, you have to think about so many different things because there are so many different moving parts—not only technically being aware of where the cameras are, but also reacting to what you are given by the competitors and making it seem effortless is probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life!

To me, programs are black boxes. You send a message in and you get a message out. I don't care if it's written in Scala or Haskell or Erlang or Python or Ruby. I care about this relationship between inputs and outputs.

16: Every program has (at least) two purposes: the one for which it was written and another for which it wasn't.

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures....
Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. […] The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

Frequently lately it’s reading a script, but that can come with some jeopardy because reading a script predisposes you to a kind of movie you expect to see, and then when it falls short of that expectation you have to realign. Sometimes the best experiences are when I know nothing about this movie, I’ve never met the director and I come and see something and I’m blank because then it’s coming at you in a way it would never come at you if you’d read the script, with an expectation.

People confuse programming with coding. Coding is to programming what typing is to writing.

I like the saying "The world is as you are." And I think films are as you are. That's why, although the frames of a film are always the same — the same number, in the same sequence, with the same sounds — every screening is different. The difference is sometimes subtle but it's there. It depends on the audience. There is a circle that goes from the audience to the film and back. Each person is looking and thinking and feeling and coming up with his or her own sense of things. And it's probably different from what I fell in love with. So you don’t know how it's going to hit people. But if you thought about how it's going to hit people, or if it's going to hurt someone, or if it's going to do this or do that, then you would have to stop making films. You just do these things that you fall in love with, and you never know what's going to happen.

Programming is generally a manual operation — we laugh when someone asks us to “say something in FORTRAN.” It is a written language, and in spite of its resemblance to other written languages, it differs from them in not having a speech system behind it. Not that written languages are simple transcriptions of speech, not at all; but a written language such as English is strongly influenced by its relationship to a spoken language. This influence is not so strong in other written languages, such as those using the Chinese writing system, but the influence — the mutual influence — always exists.

To program is to understand.

I have become cautious. There is no fixed formula. Today audience's sensibilities are sharp. You can't feed them rubbish. They want to watch good films. The script has to be appealing. Even if it is larger than life, it has to be realistic. Audiences have to identify with what you are showing.

We see only the script and not the paper on which the script is written. The paper is there, whether the script is on it or not. To those who look upon the script as real, you have to say that it is unreal--an illusion--since it rests upon paper. The wise person looks upon both paper and script as one.

All but one of the programs cited in her notes had been prepared by Babbage from three to seven years earlier. The exception was prepared by Babbage for her, although she did detect a 'bug' in it. Not only is there no evidence that Ada ever prepared a program for the Analytical Engine, but her correspondence with Babbage shows that she did not have the knowledge to do so.

A script is only the beginning of the process. But with books, what you write is exactly what people read. So as a writer, that's very satisfying.

Acting is about trusting your instincts, not censoring yourself and not looking back. Directing is the opposite in a lot of ways. It's measured. Number one, as a director, I get the script way before the actors do, so I have moments to graph out how the episode should be, understand the plot points and convey that to the actors. It's a much more structured approach, which is a bit more of my personality. I like to be more calm and in control. From there, you hope the actors bring other creative variables to the table. It's collaborative, but I'm still steering the ship.