Ellen Ullman

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. ”

I am not adopted; I have mysterious origins.' I have said that sentence many times in the course of my life as an adopted person. ”

I think many people have wonderful stories inside them and the talent to tell those stories. But the writing life, with its isolation and uncertain outcomes, keeps most from the task. ”

It is one thing for an artist to experiment on a canvas, but it's entirely different to experiment on a living creature. ”

When I hear the word 'disruption,' in my mind, I think of all these people in the middle who were earning a living. We will sweep away all that money they were earning, and we will move that to the people at the top. ”

If you've ever watched someone who is a mother talk on the phone, feed the dog, bounce the baby, it's just astounding to see someone manage, more or less well, to do all those things. But on a computer, multitasking is really binary. The task is either in the foreground, or it's not. ”

Human thinking can skip over a great deal, leap over small misunderstandings, can contain ifs and buts in untroubled corners of the mind. But the machine has no corners. Despite all the attempts to see the computer as a brain, the machine has no foreground or background. ”