Turing finds American manners peculiar

These Americans have various peculiarities in conversation which catch the ear somehow. Whenever you thank them for anything, they say ‘You’re welcome’. I rather liked it at first, thinking I was welcome, but now I find it comes back like a ball thrown against a wall, and become positively apprehensive.

Alan Turing, quoted in Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma, Centenary Ed. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2012), p. 123

Turing liked the way math is independent of human affairs

[In the mathematics degree course at Cambridge, Turing was] one of those who could feel themselves entering another country, in which social rank, money, and politics were insignificant, and in which the greatest figures, Gauss and Newton, had both been born farm boys.

Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma, Centenary Ed. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2012), p. 60

Alan responded with joy to the absolute quality of mathematics, its apparent independence of human affairs, which G.H. Hardy expressed another way: 317 is a prime, not because we think so, or because our minds are shaped in one way rather than another, but because it is so, because mathematical reality is built that way.

Id. (citing G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology (Cambridge University Press, 1940))

Codebreaking is fun! (for a brilliant guy like Turing)

[A]t the higher levels, the cryptanalytic work was intensely enjoyable. Being paid, or otherwise rewarded, seemed almost a curiosity. It was also something of a holiday even from professional mathematics, for the kind of work required was more on the line of ingenious application of elementary ideas, rather than pushing back the frontiers of scientific knowledge. It was like a solid diet of the hard puzzles in the New Statesman, with the difference that no one knew that solutions existed. 

Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma, Centenary Ed. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2012), p. 192

Ordinary life not so simple for Turing

He had wanted the commonest in nature; he liked ordinary things. But he found himself to be an ordinary English homosexual atheist mathematician. It would not be easy.

Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma, Centenary Ed. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2012), p. 115

Turing not an intellectual snob

Perhaps this was the most surprising thing about Alan Turing. Despite all he had done in the war, and all the struggles with stupidity, he still did not think of intellectuals or scientists as forming a superior class. The intelligent machine, taking over the role of the ‘masters’, would be a development which would cut the intellectual expert down to size. As Victorian technology had mechanised the work of the artisans, the computer of the future would automate the trade of intelligent thinking. The craft jealousy displayed by human experts only delighted him. In this way he was an anti-technocrat, subversively diminishing the authority of the new priests and magicians of the world. He wanted to make intellectuals into ordinary people.

Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma, Centenary Ed. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2012), pp. 363-64

Miserable British public school education

The great thing about a public school education is that afterwards, however miserable you are, you know it can never be quite so bad again.

Alan Turing, quoted in Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma, Centenary Ed. (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2012), p. 381