For me, making architecture is the same as thinking. For more than thirty years, I have been making architecture by going back and forth between ideals and reality, between the fictive and the substantive. My hope has been and continues to be, not only to solve realistic problems, but also to pursue the ideal by overlaying speculative imaginings.

Those lactate sessions were the worst. I'd be in a lab on a turbo trainer and I'd do four 30-second efforts at 100% effort. It sounds so innocuous but the difference between 99% and 100% is huge. You can finish at 99% and you'll be hurting but if you push a tiny bit more – and that's the bit that makes the difference to your training – your legs just grind to a halt. It's like your engine is seizing up. My coach would unclip my feet and pull my leg over the saddle so I could just slide off onto a mat and curl up in a ball.

The artistic process seems to be mythologized quite a lot into something far greater than it actually is. It is just hard labor. […] As anyone who actually writes knows, if you sit down and are prepared, then the ideas come. There’s a lot of different ways people explain that, but, you know, I find that if I sit down and I prepare myself, generally things get done.

Of course, the most rewarding part is the "Aha" moment, the excitement of discovery and enjoyment of understanding something new, the feeling of being on top of a hill, and having a clear view. But most of the time, doing mathematics for me is like being on a long hike with no trail and no end in sight! I find discussing mathematics with colleagues of different backgrounds one of the most productive ways of making progress.

I've always felt that death is the greatest invention of life. I'm sure that life evolved without death at first and found that without death, life didn't work very well because it didn't make room for the young. It didn't know how the world was fifty years ago. It didn't know how the world was twenty years ago. It saw it as it is today, without any preconceptions, and dreamed how it could be based on that. We're not satisfied based on the accomplishment of the last thirty years. We're dissatisfied because the current state didn't live up to their ideals. Without death there would be very little progress.

Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.

But the market was changing. The industry was changing. The scale was changing. And in the end we knew we would be either the last company to make it or the first to not make it. We were right on the edge. We thought we would be the last one that made it, but we were wrong. We were the first one that didn't. We put an end to the companies that tried to do that. We certainly made our fair share of mistakes, but in the end I think we should have taken a bit longer to realize the world was changing and just gone on to be a software company right off the bat.

When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

We spent some time in our family talking about what's the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table.

Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn't what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked.