I've told this story to lots of people and they just won't get it. All they want to get is that IBM showed up and Gary was off flying his aeroplane. The problem is that this is very wrong.… The real issue wasn't that Gary refused to talk to IBM. The real issue was that Microsoft had a much better vision for the business. Gary was very laid-back. He did not care that much.
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Gordon Eubanks, "Recollections of Gary Kildall", on IBM's attempt to license CP/M for the IBM PCGary Kildall
Beyond Gary’s creative mendacity, one aspect of his life was indubitably genuine. After Germany invaded France, Gary escaped to London, where he became a war hero, serving as a fearless bomber pilot for the Free French Forces. Flying missions even when recuperating from battle wounds, Gary fought a feisty personal, even visceral battle against the Nazis (in one interview, Gary described himself as “testicularly anti-racist”) that was a concrete reality in a life devoted to more amorphous artistry, and his wartime loyalties remained a permanent obsession.
Romain Gary
Knowing what I know now, to see everything that he’s gone through, it’s a tough deal. Even if you’re successful, it’s just a different world. It’s not real. You’ve got to separate the business from what’s real. Failure is an event, not a person. -- Gary Meeks
Travis Meeks
There must have been something in the air of Gary that led one into economics: the first Nobel Prize winner, Paul Samuelson, was also from Gary, as were several other distinguished economists... Certainly, the poverty, the discrimination, the episodic unemployment could not but strike an inquiring youngster: why did these exist, and what could we do about them.
Joseph E. Stiglitz
I don't give a shit if nobody likes me, I could care less. But they shouldn't be getting mad at me, I didn't put the [offer sheet] rule in the collective bargaining agreement. If they're mad, they should call Gary Bettman and complain to him. Get mad at Gary Bettman. He's in charge of the rules, not me. I didn't realize there were some rules we're not allowed to use.
Bobby Clarke
By the time Romain Gary shot himself in the head, the French-Russian writer had published over fifty novels under four different names, directed two movies, fought in the air force, and represented France as a consul. His marriages — first to the British writer Lesley Branch, then to the American actress Jean Seberg — had brought him celebrity. He had enmeshed some of France’s literary giants in an elaborate hoax that broke fundamental precepts of the country’s cultural institutions.
But Gary always saw his own life as a series of incomplete drafts. Even as he planned his own death, he remained on the path to self-improvement. “To renew myself, to relive, to be someone else, was always the great temptation of my existence,” read the essay he left with his suicide note. It’s perhaps no surprise that biographies of the author often seem overwhelmed by the slippery nature of their subject. “Romain Gary: The Chameleon,” “Romain Gary: The Man who Sold his Shadow.” Gary was one of France’s most successful writers, but he lived the life of a spy.Romain Gary
Kildall, Gary
Killelea, Steve
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