Quotes from Cory Doctorow

Write even when the world is chaotic. You don't need a cigarette, silence, music, a comfortable chair, or inner peace to write. You just need ten minutes and a writing implement.

All secrets become deep. All secrets become dark. That's in the nature of secrets.

I'd never been a tall guy, and the girls I'd dated had all been my height--teenaged girls grow faster than guys, which is a cruel trick of nature.

When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.

Universal access to human knowledge is in our grasp, for the first time in the history of the world. This is not a bad thing.

It's weirder and more surprising than the other books. I think there are more places where it's just more reality bending, deliberately so. I think it's a lot more emotionally raw.

It's a story of little girls who are pressed into working in sweat shops in games, who spend all day doing repetitive grinding tasks like making shirts, which are then converted into gold and sold on eBay.

It's part of a cycle of stories I'm writing where I deconstruct classic science fiction.

I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what's going on in my life.

This is why I loved technology: if you used it right, it could give you power and privacy.

I can't go underground for a year, ten years, my whole life, waiting for freedom to be handed to me. Freedom is something you have to take for yourself.

Where there's life, there's hope. Living people can change things, dead people cannot.

Any time someone puts a lock on something you own against your wishes, and doesn't give you the key, they're not doing it for your benefit.

For decades, computers have been helping us to remember, but now it's time for them to help us to ignore.

My feelings towards Scott Card are pretty mixed. Politically, he and I are pretty far apart.

Well, I don't know. It's long, it's longer than both of the other books put together, so it's more ambitious. I think I get under the skin of the people a lot more than in the other books.

The other one I did was 'I, Robot.' I take apart Isaac Asimov's Robots world.

Funny, for all surveillance, Osama bin Laden is still free—and we're not. Guess who's winning the "war on terror?

I think that this misses out on some of the interesting narrative realities, which is that it actually doesn't work very well, that eliminating diversity is actually a really good way to make a species and its individuals less robust.

I had this really great amazing thing happen where I almost finished the book and I really needed to come up with an ending and I decided to go back and re-read the book and see if I could come up with an ending.

I hate that, I said. It's like there's no human beings in the chain of responsibility, just things-that-happen. It's the ultimate cop-out. The system did it. The company did it. The government did it. What about the person who pulls the trigger?

The difference between reading a story and studying a story is the difference between living the story and killing the story and looking at its guts.

The fact is, almost everything you do is collaborative. Somewhere out there, someone else had a hand it it.

You know, there comes a point where you're not giving advice anymore. There comes a point where you're just moralizing, demonstrating your hypothetical superiority when it comes to doing the right thing. That's not very fucking helpful, you know. I'm holding my shit together right now, and rather than telling me that it's not enough, you could try to help me with the stuff I'm capable of.