Top 100 Demarco Quotes
#1. I'm paraphrasing, but yeah, a friend out of the Chicago organization did." "Chicago? You tried planting your seed in the DeMarco family?
J.M. Darhower
#2. He was Carmine Marcello DeMarco ... and even broken, he was beautiful.
J.M. Darhower
#3. Tony," DeMarco said, and Benedetto slowly opened his eyes.
Mike Lawson
#4. When I was 16, I wanted to look like Lord Byron. It's not really a haircut so much as a hair-not-cut, but I've never changed it. It's a bit Byron, a bit Don Juan DeMarco and other things that I aspire to be.
Jeremy Clarkson
#5. I'm terrible at collaborating with people; nothing ever ends up coming out good.
Mac DeMarco
#6. The project workers are the ones most familiar with the territory of the project. If a given direction doesn't make sense to them, it doesn't make any sense at all.
Tom DeMarco
#7. I thought I knew Elton John, but then it was like, "Woah, Elton's a pimp! He's really amazing." And since Billy and Elton are homies, I'm finally getting it - the two piano boys.
Mac DeMarco
#8. So far, the results confirm the folklore: Programmers seem to be a bit more productive after they've done the estimate themselves, compared to cases in which the manager did it without even consulting them. When the two did the estimating together, the results tended to fall in between.
Tom DeMarco
#9. Internal competition has the direct effect of making coaching difficult or impossible.
Tom DeMarco
#10. what matters is helping all parties understand that the success of the individual is tied irrevocably to the success of the whole.
Tom DeMarco
#11. Journalists say my music is "blue wave," or "dreamy," or "jangly-slacker jewel," and none of it really makes sense to me.
Mac DeMarco
#12. Organizational busy work tends to expand to fill the working day.
Tom DeMarco
#13. I live like a scumbag, but it's cheap.
Mac DeMarco
#14. Good management is the lifeblood of the healthy corporate body. Getting rid of it to save cost is like losing weight by giving blood.
Tom DeMarco
#15. First law of Bad Management: If something isn't working, do more of it.
Tom DeMarco
#16. If I feel like I'm going too far in one direction, I just can it. It's a weird thing. Some of my songs might be cheesy; I try and keep it light. It's hard to explain.
Mac DeMarco
#17. People who feel untrusted have little inclination to bond together into a cooperative team.
Tom DeMarco
#18. I don't care about what people might call my style. It's just like when people call my music 'jangly,' 'dream,' 'oceanside,' whatever - I don't care. I'm just wearing whatever I can scrap together.
Mac DeMarco
#19. What chaos is left in modern society is a precious commodity.
Tom DeMarco
#20. The most surprising part of the 1985 Jeffery-Lawrence study appeared at the very end, when they investigated the productivity of 24 projects for which no estimates were prepared at all. These projects far outperformed all the others
Tom DeMarco
#22. When you play a guitar for a long time, you get your hand oils in there; it starts feeling good and behaving, and you just don't want to mess with that.
Mac DeMarco
#23. A lot of people assume I have a great hat collection, but kids steal my hats at every show. I've had all these hats that I've loved, but now they're in some little kids' possession. It's difficult to replenish. I don't think the kids realize this.
Mac DeMarco
#24. Your choices are made in a moment, and yet their consequences transcend a lifetime.
MJ DeMarco
#25. Overworked managers are doing things they shouldn't be doing.
Tom DeMarco
#26. It's possible to make an organization more efficient without making it better. That's what happens when you drive out slack.
Tom DeMarco
#27. I like guitar. It just turned out that it's the instrument I learned to play. I have a lot of respect for it, and I'm learning more and more every day. For me, the classic band setup - guitars, drums, bass - will stay fresh forever. I don't know. I'm still into it.
Mac DeMarco
#28. It's so crazy now with the Internet and being able to play shows to people who are actually interested in you. I still feel so lucky when that happens. Things just happen so fast.
Mac DeMarco
#29. Work gets done on the basis of its urgency alone.
Tom DeMarco
#30. The business we're in is more sociological than technological, more dependent on workers' abilities to communicate with each other than their abilities to communicate with machines.
Tom DeMarco
#31. For me, it's all about the Canadian tuxedo, and maybe a bolero. The province I grew up in in Alberta is pretty much the denim capital of Canada. The first premier of Alberta started Grand Western Garment, which Levi's bought later on.
Mac DeMarco
#32. You can't control what you can't measure
Tom DeMarco
#33. A single person acting alone is not likely to effect any meaningful change.
Tom DeMarco
#34. Training is practice doing a new task much more slowly than an expert would do it.
Tom DeMarco
#35. practice living in faith that all is well, all is always well.
Frank DeMarco
#36. (M)ediocre, (O)bedient, (D)ependent, (E)ntertained, and (L)ifeless and
MJ DeMarco
#37. The more you focus on control, the more likely you're working on a project that's striving to deliver something of relatively minor value.
Tom DeMarco
#38. I hate living in a really small apartment, living in a shoebox, not being able to play the drums, not having space. It sucks.
Mac DeMarco
#39. Scale creates millionaires. Magnitude creates millionaires. Scale and magnitude creates billionaires.
M.J. DeMarco
#40. I'm just trying to have fun, and maybe the way I hold myself kind of freaks people out. I don't feel like an outsider, and I think my friends feel the same way I do. Now that we're playing to larger audiences, maybe we're weird to some people. But I'm trying to express what I am.
Mac DeMarco
#41. I think people do expect something a little weird to happen. Maybe they've seen something I did once on the Internet and expect that I'm gonna do that every night.
Mac DeMarco
#42. I'll probably have to open a recording studio at some point because I won't be able to pay the bills.
Mac DeMarco
#43. I was having a good time before, but you grow up after a couple years and realize, "I can't get drunk like this every night." Things change.
Mac DeMarco
#44. On the best teams, different individuals provide occasional leadership, taking charge in areas where they have particular strengths. No one is the permanent leader, because that person would then cease to be a peer and the team interaction would begin to break down.
Tom DeMarco
#45. The songs that I'm able to write are the songs I'm able to write, whatever they may be. The path I've cut for myself is pop music - love-y pop music. That's what I enjoy doing. And I don't think I'm going to get sick of it anytime soon.
Mac DeMarco
#46. Usually when festivals are really huge it's kind of weird. It's totally fun for me and my band to play in front of a crowd that doesn't necessarily know who we are, but festivals get pretty impersonal when they get super large.
Mac DeMarco
#47. Neil Young is the prime example, the grand goal, if you will. He's still shredding, and he never lost his credibility.
Mac DeMarco
#48. I've recorded at home since I was a teenager, and I'm able to sit here in my underwear and keep trying different things until something works. I think if I did that in a studio the engineer would be like, "What the hell is wrong with you?"
Mac DeMarco
#49. Thou shalt not invest in a needless business. Thou shalt not trade time for money. Thou shalt not operate on a limited scale. Thou shalt not relinquish control. Thou shalt not let a business startup be an event over process.
M.J. DeMarco
#50. At the time I was writing the second album, I was sitting home in my underwear all day every day; I didn't have all that much to write about except for my own life and my family.
Mac DeMarco
#51. Every "I hate you" echoing from her chest was followed by an "I love you" from his lips. Every time she begged him to let go, he told her he would be there forever. His hold was strong, his arms familiar, but it did nothing to take away her pain.
J.M. Darhower
#52. When stress is the problem, slack is the solution.
Tom DeMarco
#53. The way I'm portrayed on the Internet is partly my doing, but it's partly the people that are presenting it so, you know, people come to know this strange version of a human. It can be pretty weird because people think I'm digging through dumpsters and smell like crap all the time.
Mac DeMarco
#54. A lot of the songs on '2' are pretty personal, but even if I'm writing about something like that, I still tend to keep it pretty simple and open-ended. I like the idea of people listening to my album and it meaning something to me but maybe meaning something else to them.
Mac DeMarco
#55. I take making music seriously, but you have to have a sense of humor about yourself. I invite people into my life. That's how I do it.
Mac DeMarco
#56. I love Jonathan Richman - I love a lot of his music, and the thing I really like about him is his attitude. He seems very happy, and the way he performs is like, 'Don't worry, everybody, just get into it. I'm just having fun; I like when you guys are having fun.'
Mac DeMarco
#57. Good night, my hummingbird," Carmine whispered. "I'll keep you in my dreams.
J.M. Darhower
#58. I often hear people say that a person suffering from Alzheimer's is not the person they knew. I wonder to myself - Who are they then?
Bob DeMarco
#59. The statistics about reading are particularly discouraging: The average software developer, for example, doesn't own a single book on the subject of his or her work, and hasn't ever read one.
Tom DeMarco
#60. Computer system analysis is like child-rearing; you can do grievous damage, but you cannot ensure success.
Tom DeMarco
#61. Whether you call it a "team" or an "ensemble" or a "harmonious work group" is not what matters;
Tom DeMarco
#62. you are owned by your shit, which is owned by your debt, which is either owned or profited by a corporation. So you work for a corporation, everything you buy comes from a corporation, everything you watch is produced by a corporation, and the debt you owe is held by a corporation. Ah
MJ DeMarco
#63. My grandma did opera singing for the better part of her life; she used to sing all over the place. My grandpa was a sax player, and he used to travel all over the place, too.
Mac DeMarco
#64. The purpose of a team is not goal attainment but goal alignment.
Tom DeMarco
#65. I actually had a really nice guitar as a teenager. I took jazz guitar, so my mom bought me this probably $1,600 guitar. But I got really into garage rock and local bands, and I noticed they played really crappy guitars. So I thought, 'Hey, I should get a crappy guitar, too!'
Mac DeMarco
#66. Part of him was missing, a gaping hole where his heart had once been. It was the part he had left behind with her, the part she carried with her wherever she went.
J.M. Darhower
#67. we don't work overtime so much to get the work done on time as to shield ourselves from blame when the work inevitably doesn't get done on time.
Tom DeMarco
#68. Money is like a mischievous cat; if you chase it around the neighborhood, it eludes you. It hides up a tree, behind the rose bush, or in the garden. However, if you ignore it and focus on what attracts the cat, it comes to you and sits in your lap.
M.J. DeMarco
#69. As long as people tend to define themselves at least partially in terms of the work they do, any change to that work, its procedures and modes, is likely to have self-definitional importance to them. This can lead to surprising amounts of change resistance.
Tom DeMarco
#70. Quality is free, but only to those who are willing to pay heavily for it.
Tom DeMarco
#71. My music is kind of laid back, it doesn't have super crispy, shiny production, and I'm not singing my heart out or whatever. But that whole idea of blogs declaring: "this is the new denomination for this sound" is ridiculous to me.
Mac DeMarco
#72. What I call bankruptcy of inventiveness is often the result of a failure to set aside the resources necessary to let invention happen. The principal resource needed for invention is slack. When companies can't invent, it's usually because their people are too damn busy.
Tom DeMarco
#73. I'm just being myself. I'm not a very complex guy; I'm not a very studious, crazy intellectual guy. I'm just a guy.
Mac DeMarco
#74. When people think of someone being prolific, it's like, 'He's got a vault with 5,000 songs in it,' or something, but I just kind of pick them out of the air when they float by.
Mac DeMarco
#75. I think recording at home feels more organic, and injects some more personality into the music.
Mac DeMarco
#76. I've been trying to take the high road, you know, the Capone way ...
J.M. Darhower
#77. Perfectionist? That's not something I am.
Mac DeMarco
#78. What we are looking for is managers who are awake enough to alter the world as they find it, to make it harmonize with what they and their people are trying to accomplish.
Tom DeMarco
#79. Ownership of the standard should be in the hands of those who do the work.
Tom DeMarco
#80. IBM actually followed the recommendations and built a workplace where people can work. (We predict this company will go far.)
Tom DeMarco
#81. People under time pressure don't think faster." - Tim Lister Think rate is fixed. No matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, you can't pick up the pace of thinking.
Tom DeMarco
#82. I'm a pretty easygoing person, and it bleeds into the music. Even if I'm writing the most personal song, it's not going to come out totally serious; there's always a little tongue in the cheek.
Mac DeMarco
#83. Debt needs a constant drip of blood, and that blood comes from your gas tank of life: time. And since time is fixed, an increase in indentured time comes from only one source: your free time.
M.J. DeMarco
#84. I don't have that much experience in the studio, but I'm always really uncomfortable when I'm there. You're on the clock and it costs a lot of money.
Mac DeMarco
#85. Some of the most flowery praise you hear on the subject of teams is only hypocrisy. Managers learn to talk a good game about teams even when they're secretly threatened by the whole concept.
Tom DeMarco
#86. Visual supervision is a joke for development workers. Visual supervision is for prisoners.
Tom DeMarco
#87. A disturbing possibility is that overtime is not so much a means to increase the quantity of work time as to improve its average quality.
Tom DeMarco
#88. In 21 projects studied that same year, estimates were prepared by a third party, typically a systems analyst. The developers in these cases substantially outperformed the projects in which estimating was done by a programmer and/or a supervisor
Tom DeMarco
#89. If people are talking about you, that's great. You start making more money, that's great. You get to go to weird places, that's great. The music industry is weird, especially with the Internet. People are calling you all kinds of weird stuff, like 'jangly.'
Mac DeMarco
#90. Get the right people. Then no matter what all else you might do wrong after that, the people will save you. That's what management is all about.
Tom DeMarco
#91. I am saddened when I hear these words -this is not the person I knew - because those words objectify the person suffering from Alzheimer's. When you objectify a person you also dehumanize them. Once dehumanized the person becomes a villain.
Bob DeMarco
#92. It's so crazy with the Internet and being able to play shows to people who are actually interested in you. I feel so lucky when that happens.
Mac DeMarco
#93. I never liked living in Montreal. And I don't really like the music scene there. It was never my cup of tea, and I never felt like I ever fit in.
Mac DeMarco
#94. The problem is not people being educated. The problem is that they are educated just enough to believe what they've been taught, but not educated enough to question what they've been taught.
~ Author Unknown
MJ DeMarco
#95. The manager's function is not to make people work, it is to make it possible for people to work.
Tom DeMarco
#96. Patience is important, and also, if you don't want to do it, don't do it. But if you do, do. That's a general rule in how I live my life.
Mac DeMarco
#98. I'm not really good at writing sad sappy ballads. In terms of the lyrics not matching the vibe of the music, that's kind of the way my career has gone; everyone is a little confused about it all the time.
Mac DeMarco
#99. It's easy (and fair) to blame lousy management on lousy managers. But it's not enough. It's also necessary to blame the people who allow themselves to be managed so badly.
Tom DeMarco
#100. wasn't as important as the act of changing. People were charmed by differentness, they liked the attention, they were intrigued by novelty. This has come to be called the Hawthorne Effect.
Tom DeMarco
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