Cory Doctorow Quotes

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.

No one should do a job he can do in his sleep.

He had them as spellbound as a room full of Ewoks listening to C-3PO.

These days, tales of what Facebook did with its users during the singularity are commonly used to scare naughty children in Wales.

Each generation of rabbis is necessarily less perfect than the rabbis that came before, since each generation is more removed from the perfection of the Garden. Therefore, no rabbi is allowed to overturn any of his forebears' wisdom, since they are all, by definition, smarter than him.

We have a name for things that don't copy themselves: dead.

... I think that I was too self-centered to ever develop good skills as a peacemaker. In my younger days, I assumed that it was because I was smarter than everyone else, with no patience for explaining things in short words for mouthbreathers who just didn't get it.

We don’t care about what you did yesterday—we care about what you’re going to do tomorrow.

It may be hard to monetize fame, but it is impossible to monetize obscurity.

Everyone wants a definition of creativity that makes what they do into something special and what everyone else does into nothing special. But the fact is, we're all creative. We come up with weird and interesting ideas all the time. The biggest difference between 'creators' isn't their imagination - it's how hard they work. Ideas are easy. Doing stuff is hard.

Disney is a delight, someone who ... sweeps those around him along on his dream.

Any outfit that can't figure out clean toilets and decent theming on its own can't benefit from my advice.

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.

I'm 17 years old. I'm not a straight-A student or anything. Even so, I figured out how to make an Internet that they can't wiretap. I figured out how to jam their person-tracking technology. I can turn innocent people into suspects and turn guilty people into innocents in their eyes. I could get metal onto an airplane or beat a no-fly list. I figured this stuff out by looking at the web and by thinking about it. If I can do it, terrorists can do it. They told us they took away our freedom to make us safe. Do you feel safe?

Take it from someone who's read the Wikipedia entry: this is how the Ottoman Empire was won: madden horsemen fueled by lethal jet-black coffee-mud.

It's our goddamed city! It's our goddamed country. No terrorist can take it from us for so long as we're free. Once we're not free, the terrorists win! Take it back! You're young enough and stupid enough not to know that you can't possibly win, so you're the only ones who can lead us to victory! Take it back!

Put simply, I want to treat my readers as partners and not crooks. There is no future in calling your most active promoters crooks.

Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.

When you teach your students that it's "economically rational" to commit crimes where the fines for misconduct are lower than the expected return on the crime, you instill a professional ethic that has no room for morals.

I don't know anything about press conferences." "Oh, just Google it. I'm sure someone's written an article on holding a successful one. I mean, if the President can manage it, I'm sure you can. He looks like he can barely tie his shoes without help.

Skipping school isn't a crime. It's an infraction. They're totally different.

Technology giveth and technology taketh away.

It's the stupid questions that have some of the most surprising and interesting answers. Most people never think to ask the stupid questions.

Digital Distribution and the Whip Hand: Don't Get iTunesed with your eBooks

The future's a weirder place than we thought it would be when we were little kids.

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

The United States of America was a pirate nation for the first one hundred years of its existence, ripping off the patents and trademarks of the imperial European powers it had liberated itself from by blood. By keeping their GDP at home, the U.S. revolutionaries were able to bootstrap their nation into an industrial powerhouse. Now, it seems, their descendants are bent on ensuring that no other country can pull the same trick off.

Every time I go past a cinema and see a queue out the door, I think, look at those fools, every penny they spend is turned into profits that are used to pass laws imprisoning their own children. Can't they see?

The first casualty of any battle is the plan of attack.

Like all security, privacy is hard.

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

Once you get to naming your laptop, you know that you're really having a deep relationship with it.

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

If the best way to learn to succeed is to fail as fast as possible, then the second-best way is to watch someone else fail as fast as possible. Watching someone else screw up is a kind of rehearsal for your own eventual downfall. A close observation of someone else's attempt to resolve a difficulty is a great way to acquire real-world insight into whether and when to deploy their method in your own times of trouble.

Write even when the world is chaotic.

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

I think that Utopia is a theory of human action.

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

Giant letters march across the dome of the sky: HOME NOT FOUND. Huw, who knows Comic Sans when she sees it, winces in mild disgust.

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.

Terrorism is about magnifying one mediagenic act of violence into one hundred billion acts of terrorized authoritarian idiocy.

If you stare at someone long enough, they'll eventually look back at you.

The idea that bigger haystacks have more needles in them is dumb on its face

Right, and you point out something important which is that people who don’t want to pay, people who are pirates, don’t get bothered by the DRM, they go out and buy the cracked books or download the cracked books for free. It’s only people who are foolish enough to pay for them that get locked into these platforms.

Novels for me are how I find out what's going on in my own head. And so that's a really useful and indeed critical thing to do when you do as many of these other things as I do.

It's not necessarily about what career you pick. It's about how you do what you do.

He hated it when adults told him he only felt the way he did because he was young. As if being young was like being insane or drunk, like the convictions he held were hallucinations caused by a mental illness that could only be cured by waiting five years.