FWIW, Fred Brooks has a quote that is similar in spirit to the one you mentioned. It's in Chapter 1, The Tar Pit (under the title The Joys of the Craft):

> Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by the exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures…