Ellen Ullman

I don't consider myself a Jewish writer.

I feel the best villains are the ones you have feelings for.

My mother told me that my birth mother got pregnant by a married man who didn't want to leave his wife.

I am not intimidated by puerile boys acting like pre-teens.

When I am writing, and occasionally achieve single focus and presence, I finally feel that is where I'm supposed to be. Everything else is kind of anxiety.

To be a programmer is to develop a carefully managed relationship with error. There's no getting around it. You either make your accommodations with failure, or the work will become intolerable.

Each new tool we create ends an old relationship with the world and starts a new one. And we're changed by that relationship, inevitably. It changes the way we live, changes our patterns, changes our social organization.

Our relationship to the computer is much like our relationship to the car: rich, complex, socially messy.

After we have put our intimate secrets and credit card numbers online, what can prevent us from putting our elections there as well?

Some people hit a profession and just keep going deeper into it, making a life and making it more and more stable. That's not been my experience. I always want to try something new.

A computer is a general-purpose machine with which we engage to do some of our deepest thinking and analyzing. This tool brings with it assumptions about structuredness, about defined interfaces being better. Computers abhor error.

Writing was a way to get away from my life as a programmer, so I wanted to write about other things, but of course nobody wanted to publish another story about a family, unless it was extraordinary. When I began writing about my life as a programmer, however, people were interested.