I also really like this quote and his has influenced the way I work a lot. When I started working professionally as programmer I sometimes ended up with quite clunky data structures, a lot of expensive copying (C++ :-)) and difficult maintenance.

But based on this, I always take greatest care about the data structures. Especially when designing database tables, I keep all the important aspects of it in mind (normalization/denormalization, complexity of queries on it, ...) Makes writing code so much more pleasurable and it's also key to make maintenance a non-issue.

Amazing how far-sighted this is, when considering that most Web Apps are basically I/O - i.e. data - bound.