Software is a great combination between artistry and engineering.

After ten years of word processing, I can’t even do hand writing anymore.

The truth of Moore’s law has made remarkable things possible. On the software side, I think natural user interfaces in all their forms are equally significant.

Everyone seems to think that digital technology devoids the medium of content, but that is not true at all. If anything, it broadens the content.

Flying cars are not a very efficient way to move things from one point to another.

There are really two things that have to occur in order for a new technology to be affordable to the mass market. One is you need economies of scale. The other is you need to iterate on the design. You need to go through a few versions.

We have too many cellphones. We’ve got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.

I like the word ‚autopilot‘ more than I like the word ‚self-driving.‘ ‚Self-driving‘ sounds like it’s going to do something you don’t want it to do. ‚Autopilot‘ is a good thing to have in planes, and we should have it in cars.

First was the mouse. The second was the click wheel. And now, we’re going to bring multi-touch to the market. And each of these revolutionary interfaces has made possible a revolutionary product – the Mac, the iPod and now the iPhone.

The biggest mistake we made as a company was betting too much on HTML5.

If Al Gore invented the Internet, I invented spell check.

We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

My background educationally is physics and economics, and I grew up in sort of an engineering environment – my father is an electromechanical engineer. And so there were lots of engineery things around me.

Please don’t make the mistake of thinking that ‚Oryx and Crake‘ is anti-science. Science is a way of knowing, and a tool. Like all ways of knowing and tools, it can be turned to bad uses. And it can be bought and sold, and it often is. But it is not in itself bad. Like electricity, it’s neutral.

I’m trying my best to keep up with all this new technology, and I surround myself with all these wonderful people that are in the know and kind of help me out with all that.

SpaceX is only 12 years old now. Between now and 2040, the company’s lifespan will have tripled. If we have linear improvement in technology, as opposed to logarithmic, then we should have a significant base on Mars, perhaps with thousands or tens of thousands of people.

My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when – and he won’t necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.

All art is dependent on technology because it’s a human endeavour, so even when you’re using charcoal on a wall or designed the proscenium arch, that’s technology.

I get asked a lot why Apple’s customers are so loyal. It’s not because they belong to the Church of Mac! That’s ridiculous.

I had wanted a tape recorder since I was tiny. I thought it was a magic thing. I never got one until just before I went to art school.

I’m a geek.

I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.

From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

I always wanted to do things right and represent myself as somebody that took the art serious and someone that took the business serious also, so I had time to weigh the options and figure it out and do my best to create the situation that was ideal.

The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.

If you grew up, and you never had a computer, and you’ve never used the Internet, and someone asked you if you wanted to buy a data plan, your response would be ‚What’s a data plan, and why would I want to use this?‘

Drones overall will be more impactful than I think people recognize, in positive ways to help society.

Ebooks had to happen.

A true artist is expected to be all that is noble-minded, and this is not altogether a mistake; on the other hand, however, in what a mean way are critics allowed to pounce upon us.

We want to make it so that anyone, anywhere – a child growing up in rural India who never had a computer – can go to a store, get a phone, get online, and get access to all of the same things that you and I appreciate about the Internet.

We could definitely make a flying car – but that’s not the hard part. The hard part is, how do you make a flying car that’s super safe and quiet? Because if it’s a howler, you’re going to make people very unhappy.

To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines.

I don’t have an alarm clock. If someone needs to wake me up, then I have my BlackBerry next to me.

FaceTime helps me a lot. I feel like I’m at home even though I’m not.

The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it to a nationwide communications network. We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people – as remarkable as the telephone.

What we want to be is something completely new. There is no physical analog for what Amazon.com is becoming.

I think – I don’t know, maybe it’s nostalgia. But the choice, losing the choice to be able to use film is going to be – it’s gone. It’s going to be gone.

The art of acting is not to act. Once you show them more, what you show them, in fact is bad acting.

I got my first computer in the 6th grade or so. As soon as I got it, I was interested in finding out how it worked and how the programs worked and then figuring out how to write programs at just deeper and deeper levels within the system.

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.

I pay attention to politics and technology.

The desktop metaphor was invented because one, you were a stand-alone device, and two, you had to manage your own storage. That’s a very big thing in a desktop world. And that may go away. You may not have to manage your own storage. You may not store much before too long.

I was always trying – I never wanted to let my fans down; I always wanted them to see me in my art form.

I’m a Silicon Valley guy. I just think people from Silicon Valley can do anything.

I think a lot of the time there isn’t such a black-and-white difference between what’s a platform and what’s an app. It’s really just like the most important apps become platforms.

Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity. So it’s like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left.

Man is a tool-using animal. Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.

The computer can’t tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what’s missing is the eyebrows.

It takes these very simple-minded instructions – ‚Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it’s greater than this other number‘ – but executes them at a rate of, let’s say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per second, the results appear to be magic.

The desktop computer industry is dead. Innovation has virtually ceased. Microsoft dominates with very little innovation. That’s over. Apple lost. The desktop market has entered the dark ages, and it’s going to be in the dark ages for the next 10 years, or certainly for the rest of this decade.

This whole phenomenon of the computer in a library is an amazing thing.

Really advanced civilization is based on advances in energy.

If you think back to the beginning of cell phones, laptops or really any new technology, it’s always expensive.

The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.

I think Tesla will most likely develop its own autopilot system for the car, as I think it should be camera-based, not Lidar-based. However, it is also possible that we do something jointly with Google.

You can’t be in love with a Google search.

Eventually we’ll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system.

The humanists‘ replacement for religion: work really hard and somehow you’ll either save yourself or you’ll be immortal. Of course, that’s a total joke, and our progress is nothing. There may be progress in technology but there’s no ethical progress whatsoever.

Facebook is in a very different place than Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, and Microsoft. We are trying to build a community.

One of my big regrets is that Facebook hasn’t had a major chance to shape the mobile operating system ecosystem.

Innovation has nothing to do with how many R & D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R & D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.