CORY DOCTOROW

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.

It's hard not to like Asimov; he's a really likable guy.

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

The real damage from terrorist attacks doesn't come from the explosion. The real damage is done after the explosion, by the victims, who repeatedly and determinedly attack themselves, giving over reason in favor of terror... Terrorism is about magnifying one mediagenic act of violence into one hundred billion acts of terrorized authoritarian idiocy.

Abnormal is so common, it's practically normal.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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