Cory Doctorow Quotes

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

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

Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor.

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

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.

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

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.

The big problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Engineers are all basically high-functioning autistics who have no idea how normal people do stuff.

The accolade of your peers is very exciting, always. There's lots of good stuff on the ballot.

... the Kindle is a "roach motel" device: its license terms and DRM ensure that books can check in, but they can't check out.

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

What if I got hit by lightning while walking with an umbrella? Ban umbrellas! Fight the menace of lightning!

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.

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

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

It is a mistake to let aesthetics drive your rational decision making.

Like all security, privacy is hard.

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.

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

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

I choose YouTube over telly.

The important thing about security systems isn’t how they work, it’s how they fail.

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.

Stories are propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions.

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

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

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

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

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

if it's not in my email archive, I don't know it

We roared. We were one big animal throat, roaring.

Freedom is something you have to take for yourself.

There is no future in which bits will be harder to copy than they are today ... Any business model that based on the idea that bits will be harder to copy is doomed.

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

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

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

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.

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

It is not gender, nor age, nor race, but your ability to work hard at what you love.

Carlton Mellick III is one of bizarro fiction's most talented practitioners, a virtuoso of the surreal, science fictional tale.

Technology giveth and technology taketh away.

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

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

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