Martin

“When the day gets more complicated, there’s more and more demands on your time. Instead of time on your hands, you have hands on your time — I like that! That’s the question involved there: you have to put aside all that, and it’s songwriting that’s important, and that’s going to make the difference between feeling good and not feeling good. If I walk offstage knowing I haven’t played as well as I can, I feel bad. And it doesn’t matter how many thousands of people are telling me it was good — it wasn’t. On the other hand when I walk offstage knowing that I’ve played well or close to as well as I can, then I feel very satisfied. And it’s a sort of peace of mind that nothing can intrude on, negatively or positively. You just feel good about it and you don’t need external ratification or external approval for that.”
― Martin Popoff, Limelight: Rush in the ’80s

“Millions of Gen-Xers and Millennials watched the fallout from Bush vs. Gore unfold in the news while Kid A droned on endlessly through their headphones. It was an eerily ideal soundtrack for what seemed like a darker, more foreboding time after the peace and prosperity of the ’90s—a gloomily disorienting fanfare for a new era. Though we had no way of knowing exactly how dark.”
― Steven Hyden, This Isn't Happening: Radiohead's "Kid A" and the Beginning of the 21st Century

“There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order of magnitude improvement in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity. … Not only are there no silver bullets now in view, the very nature of software makes it unlikely that there will be any.”
― Adam Barr, The Problem with Software: Why Smart Engineers Write Bad Code