Cory Doctorow
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.Collection: Amazing
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.
The accolade of your peers is very exciting, always. There's lots of good stuff on the ballot.
It's part of a cycle of stories I'm writing where I deconstruct classic science fiction.
My feelings towards Scott Card are pretty mixed. Politically, he and I are pretty far apart.
The other one I did was 'I, Robot.' I take apart Isaac Asimov's Robots world.
It's hard not to like Asimov; he's a really likable guy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Put simply, I want to treat my readers as partners and not crooks. There is no future in calling your most active promoters crooks.
Never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor.Collection: Determination
The important thing about security systems isn’t how they work, it’s how they fail.Collection: Security Systems
We have a name for things that don't copy themselves: dead.Collection: Names
The fact is, almost everything you do is collaborative. Somewhere out there, someone else had a hand it it.Collection: Hands
This is why I loved technology: if you used it right, it could give you power and privacy.Collection: Technology
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.Collection: Writing
If you stare at someone long enough, they'll eventually look back at you.Collection: Long
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.Collection: World
We don’t care about what you did yesterday—we care about what you’re going to do tomorrow.Collection: Engineering
Abnormal is so common, it's practically normal.Collection: Abnormal
It's the stupid questions that have some of the most surprising and interesting answers. Most people never think to ask the stupid questions.Collection: Stupid
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.Collection: Years
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.Collection: Keys
Where there's life, there's hope. Living people can change things, dead people cannot.Collection: People
What if I got hit by lightning while walking with an umbrella? Ban umbrellas! Fight the menace of lightning!Collection: Fighting
The future's a weirder place than we thought it would be when we were little kids.Collection: Kids
The opposite of esprit d'escalier is the way that life's embarrassments come back to haunt us even after they're long past. I could remember every stupid thing I'd ever said or done, recall them with picture-perfect clarity. Any time I was feeling low, I'd naturally start to remember other times I felt that way, a hit parade of humiliations coming one after another to my mind.Collection: Stupid
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.Collection: Happiness
Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.Collection: Kings
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?Collection: Airplane
The first casualty of any battle is the plan of attack.Collection: Battle
We're going to fight this battle with everything we have, and we will probably lose. But then we will fight it again, and we will lose a little less, for this battle will win us many supporters. And then we'll lose *again*. And *again*. And we will fight on. Because as hard as it is to win by fighting, it's impossible to win by doing nothing.Collection: Fighting
It may be hard to monetize fame, but it is impossible to monetize obscurity.Collection: Obscurity
Once you get to naming your laptop, you know that you're really having a deep relationship with it.Collection: Laptops
All secrets become deep. All secrets become dark. That's in the nature of secrets.Collection: Dark
Any outfit that can't figure out clean toilets and decent theming on its own can't benefit from my advice.Collection: Advice
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.Collection: Country
I fireballed him as he was seeking out treasure after we wiped out a band of orcs, playing rock-paper-scissors with each orc to determine who would prevail in combat. This is a lot more exciting than it sounds. It's quite civilized, and a little weird. You go running after someone through the woods, catch up with him, bare your teeth, and sit down to play a little roshambo.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Creativity
It is not gender, nor age, nor race, but your ability to work hard at what you love.Collection: Hard Work
He had them as spellbound as a room full of Ewoks listening to C-3PO.Collection: Listening
The good news (for writers) is that this means that ebooks on computers are more likely to be an enticement to buy the printed book (which is, after all, cheap, easily had, and easy to use) than a substitute for it. You can probably read just enough of the book off the screen to realize you want to be reading it on paper.Collection: Reading
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.Collection: Coffee
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.Collection: Mean
Stop in the middle of a sentence, leaving a rough edge for you to start from the nest day - that way, you can write three or five words without being “creative” and before you know it, you're writing.Collection: Writing
Carlton Mellick III is one of bizarro fiction's most talented practitioners, a virtuoso of the surreal, science fictional tale.Collection: Fiction
Technology giveth and technology taketh away.Collection: Technology