Doctorow Books Quotes & Sayings

I wanted to figure out how long to cook things. I did some experiments and then wrote a program using Mathematica to model how heat is transferred through food. — Nathan Myhrvold

The problem with reading off a screen isn't resolution, eyestrain, or compatibility with reading in the bathtub: it's that computers are seductive, they tempt us to do other things, making concentrating on a long-form work impractical. — Cory Doctorow

New media don't succeed because they're like the old media, only better: they succeed because they're worse than the old media at the stuff the old media is good at, and better at the stuff the old media are bad at. Books are good at being paperwhite, high-resolution, low-infrastructure, cheap and disposable. Ebooks are good at being everywhere in the world at the same time for free in a form that is so malleable that you can just pastebomb it into your IM session or turn it into a page-a-day mailing list. — Cory Doctorow

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. — Cory Doctorow

that feeling of being alone and together at the same time. — Adam Johnson

Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction. — E.L. Doctorow

I didn't want to be beholden to one person. So I did something where I had hundreds of people who backed the work. I could just do work, and since a lot of people were interested in it, I wasn't beholden to any particular one of them. — Molly Crabapple

There are people already sharing eBooks out there, .. and they do it simply because they love books. You don't buy a second copy of a book, cut the spine off, lay each page on a scanner, run that .tif through an OCR (Optical Character Reader), hand edit the resulting output for errors and then post it online if you don't love the book. it can up to 80 hours to turn a printed novel into an eBook. I figure if someone out there is willing to put in 80 hours of work promoting my book, then I'd prefer they do it in a way that gives a better return to me. — Cory Doctorow

What's interesting about Stephen Baldwin is that me and Dana Gould were originally cast for 'Bio-Dome' - but Pauly Shore and Baldwin ended up doing it. So there's a little movie trivia for ya. — Harland Williams

Cory Doctorow should be too busy for lunch. He's co-editor of, and a prolific contributor to, one of the most influential blogs in the world, Boing Boing. Over the past decade the Canadian-born writer has published 16 books, mostly science fiction novels. He campaigns vigorously on the politics of the digital age. — Tim Harford

My cats - I have Luna who's just had kittens recently and we called one of them Dumbledore. They're nice but they're not like their characters. — Evanna Lynch

Nothing is forever except change. — Gautama Buddha

I remember when I was in school I had this teacher give me this E.L. Doctorow quote: They asked him how much historical research he does for his books and he said, 'As little as possible.' So I try and adhere to that. — Scott Snyder

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. — Cory Doctorow

My books start almost before I realise it. Once in a while, some accident causes an idea to rise to the surface and say: 'now.' — E.L. Doctorow

And why? Is our genius only in our wombs? Can we not write books and create learned scholarship and perform music and provide philosophical models for the betterment of mankind? — E.L. Doctorow

Children have a lot more to worry about from the parents who raised them than from the books they read. — E.L. Doctorow

People perceive punk rock in the sense of Sid Vicious, all strung-out, crazy and insane. — Hayley Williams

She belonged to me. She was all the things I wasn't. And I was all the things she wasn't. Her hand, it fit mine. — Jodi Picoult

There are two books that impressed me when I was very young. One was 'The Adventures of Augie March' - the idea of having something so generous, and so adventurous and improvisatory. The other was 'The U.S.A. Trilogy,' by John Dos Passos. — E.L. Doctorow

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. — Cory Doctorow

Obama is a great man who's just beginning to understand the realities. And I'm not just saying that because he reads my books. I would have voted for him anyway. — E.L. Doctorow

My goal is for 'The Bill Engvall Show' to be a show the networks look at and say, 'Ooh, maybe we should get back to the family sitcom.' — Bill Engvall

A writer of books has to admit that film is the enemy, and that in my case I have been sleeping with the enemy. — E.L. Doctorow

But when, in the first setting out, he takes it for granted without proof, that distinctions found in the structure of all languages, have no foundation in nature; this surely is too fastidious a way of treating the common sense of mankind. — Thomas Reid

We must unite to make nuclear weapons a horror of the past. — Michael Douglas

It seems to me that in literature, books have always been answers to other books. — E.L. Doctorow

What's the point of a houseful of books you've already read? — Cory Doctorow

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. — Cory Doctorow

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

Most of the books, music and movies ever released are not available for sale, anywhere in the world. In the brief time that P2P nets have flourished, the ad-hoc masses of the Internet have managed to put just about everything online. What's more, they've done it far cheaper than any other archiving/revival effort ever. — Cory Doctorow