Cory Doctorow: Trending quotes (page 3)

“First-time novelists have a tough row to hoe. Our publishers don’t have a lot of promotional budget to throw at unknown factors like us. Mostly, we rise and fall based on word-of-mouth.”

Cory Doctorow book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

"A note about this book, January 9, 2003
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003)

Time

“I'm not a lawyer— I'm a kind of mouthpiece/activist type, though occasionally they shave me and stuff me into my Bar Mitzvah suit and send me to a standards body or the UN to stir up trouble. I spend about three weeks a month on the road doing completely weird stuff like going to Microsoft to talk about DRM.”

Cory Doctorow

Microsoft Research DRM talk http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt(17 June 2004)

“Larry poured himself a coffee. "I hate when they come in here with computers. They sit forever at their tables, and they don't talk to nobody, it's like having a place full of statues or zombies."”

Cory Doctorow Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (2005)

Hate , Coffee

“One form of math denial is the belief in the ability to make computers that prevent copyright infringement. Computers only ever work by making copies: restricting copying on the internet is like restricting wetness in water.”

Cory Doctorow

The FBI wants a backdoor only it can use – but wanting it doesn't make it possible http://theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/24/the-fbi-wants-a-backdoor-only-it-can-use-but-wanting-it-doesnt-make-it-possible in The Guardian (24 February 2016)

Water

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

Cory Doctorow Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (2005)

“It was nice to think that the key to feeding nine billion people was to measure return on investment by maximizing calories and minimizing misery, instead of minimizing capital investment and maximizing retained earnings to shareholders.”

Cory Doctorow

Source: Short fiction, The Man Who Sold The Moon (2014), p. 166

Thinking , People

“They just hated and feared us because our government hated and feared them.”

Cory Doctorow

Source: Short fiction, The Man Who Sold The Moon (2014), p. 154

Fear , Hate

“The problem with world hunger is that rich, powerful governments are more than happy to send guns and money to dictators and despots who’ll use food to control their populations and line their pockets. There is no ‘world hunger’ problem. There’s a corruption problem. There’s a greed problem. There’s a gullibility problem....”
“So there’s a corruption problem,” I said. “Point taken. How about if we make a solution for the corruption problem, then? Maybe we could build some kind of visualizer that shows you if your Congresscritter is taking campaign contributions from companies and then voting for laws that benefit them?”

Cory Doctorow

“What, you mean like every single one of them?”
Source: Short fiction, The Man Who Sold The Moon (2014), p. 149 (ellipsis represents a brief elision of text)

Money , Hunger , Law , Food

“Doesn’t matter how old the speaker is, it’s the words that matter.”

Cory Doctorow

Source: Short fiction, The Man Who Sold The Moon (2014), p. 148

“Existence proofs always trump theory. That’s engineering.”

Cory Doctorow

Source: Short fiction, The Man Who Sold The Moon (2014), p. 135

“Look, whatever else happiness is, it’s also some kind of chemical reaction. Your body making and experiencing a cocktail of hormones and other molecules in response to stimulus. Brain reward. A thing that feels good when you do it. We’ve had millions of years of evolution that gave a reproductive edge to people who experienced pleasure when something pro-survival happened. Those individuals did more of whatever made them happy, and if what they were doing more of gave them more and hardier offspring, then they passed this on.”
“Yes,” I said. “Sure. At some level, that’s true of all our emotions, I guess.”

Cory Doctorow

“I don’t know about that,” she said. “I’m just talking about happiness. The thing is, doing stuff is pro-survival—seeking food, seeking mates protecting children, thinking up better ways to hide from predators...Sitting still and doing nothing is almost never pro-survival, because the rest of the world is running around, coming up with strategies to outbreed you, to outcompete you for food and territory...If you stay still, they’ll race past you.”
Source: Short fiction, The Man Who Sold The Moon (2014), p. 130

Happiness , People , Pleasure , Making love

“It turns out that teaching is one of those things like raising a kid or working out—sometimes amazing, often difficult and painful, but, in hindsight, amazing.”

Cory Doctorow

Source: Short fiction, The Man Who Sold The Moon (2014), p. 129

Pain

“Okay, this is the thing. We spend all our time doing, you know, stuff. Maintenance. Ninety-eight percent of the day, all you’re doing is thinking about what you’re going to be doing to go on doing what you’re doing. Worrying about whether you’ve got enough socked away to see you through your old age without ending up eating cat food. Worrying about whether you’re getting enough fiber or eating too many carbs. It’s being alive, but it’s hardly living.”

Cory Doctorow

Source: Short fiction, The Man Who Sold The Moon (2014), p. 114

Time , Food , Cats , Thinking