Top 25 John Carmack Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Focused, hard work is the real key to success.”

— John Carmack

Featured in: Focus Quotes

2. “If you aren’t sure which way to do something, do it both ways and see which works better.”

— John Carmack

Featured in: Programming Quotes

3. “Sometimes, the elegant implementation is just a function. Not a method. Not a class. Not a framework. Just a function.”

— John Carmack

Featured in: Programming Quotes

4. “Low-level programming is good for the programmer’s soul.”

— John Carmack

Featured in: Programming Quotes

5. “An interesting question: is it easier to motivate a learned individual that never does anything, or educate an ignorant individual that actually produces things?”

— John Carmack

6. “The speed of light sucks.”

— John Carmack

7. “Because of the nature of Moore’s law, anything that an extremely clever graphics programmer can do at one point can be replicated by a merely competent programmer some number of years later.”

— John Carmack

Featured in: Programming Quotes

8. “The situation is so much better for programmers today – a cheap used PC, a linux CD, and an internet account, and you have all the tools necessary to work your way to any level of programming skill you want to shoot for.”

— John Carmack

9. “If you’re willing to restrict the flexibility of your approach, you can almost always do something better.”

— John Carmack

10. “Making one brilliant decision and a whole bunch of mediocre ones isn’t as good as making a whole bunch of generally smart decisions throughout the whole process.”

— John Carmack

Featured in: Programming Quotes

11. “You can prematurely optimize maintainability, flexibility, security, and robustness just like you can performance.”

— John Carmack

12. “It is not that uncommon for the cost of an abstraction to outweigh the benefit it delivers. Kill one today!”

— John Carmack

13. “One of the big lessons of a big project is you don’t want people that aren’t really programmers programming, you’ll suffer for it!”

— John Carmack

Featured in: Programming Quotes

14. “I recognize that I possess a very special intellect, but at the same time, I recognize that I’m lacking in a lot of areas. But being well-rounded is greatly overrated.”

— John Carmack

15. “Everybody’s saturated with the marketing hype of next-generation consoles. They are wonderful, but the truth is that they are as powerful as a high end PC is right now.”

— John Carmack

16. “I’d rather have a search engine or a compiler on a deserted island than a game.”

— John Carmack

17. “Note to self: Pasty-skinned programmers ought not stand in the Mojave desert for multiple hours.”

— John Carmack

Featured in: Programming Quotes

18. “At its best, entertainment is going to be a subjective thing that can’t win for everyone, while at worst, a particular game just becomes a random symbol for petty tribal behavior.”

— John Carmack

19. “I like to think I’m pretty good at what I do.”

— John Carmack

20. “It’s nice to have a game that sells a million copies.”

— John Carmack

21. “The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying.”

— John Carmack

22. “The Xbox 360 is the first console that I’ve ever worked with that actually has development tools that are better for games than what we’ve had on PC.”

— John Carmack

23. “Honestly, I spend very little time thinking about past events, and I certainly don’t have them ranked in any way. I look back and think that I have done a lot of good work over the years, but I am much more excited about what the future holds.”

— John Carmack

24. “I wanted to remain a technical adviser for Id, but it just didn’t work out. Probably for the best, as the divided focus was challenging.”

— John Carmack

25. “We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games. That statement will enrage some people, but it is hard to characterize it otherwise; both console versions will have larger audiences than the PC version.”

— John Carmack

26. “It’s a good thing Doom 3 is selling very well...”

— John Carmack

27. “It is difficult to make good scalable use of a CPU like you can of a graphics card. You certainly don’t want ‘better or worse’ physics or AI in your game.”

— John Carmack