Clay Shirky Quotes

It did not take long after the rise of the commercial printing press before someone figured out that erotic novels were a good idea. ... It took people another 150 years to even think of the scientific journal.

It was not till toward the end of the thirteenth century that the prose romances began to appear.

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along.

An interesting thing about New Zealand, you know, literature is that it really didn't begin in any real sense until the 20th century.

I've been trying to write for as long as I can remember. But those first fifteen years didn't produce much of great interest. I mean, it embarrasses me very much to look back on my early poems--very few lines of any merit at all and lots of affectation. But there were quite a lot of them. That's a point in one's favor.

A curious thing about written literature: It is about four thousand years old, but we have no way of knowing whether four thousand years constitutes senility or the maiden blush of youth.

Almost every modern literary form existed in Hebrew two thousand years ago. And, yes, it existed even during the middle ages.

I try to think about Shakespeare, leap year, the Beatles.

Around 400 million people in the last year got a smartphone. If you think that’s a big deal, imagine the impact on that person in the developing world.

Here I am, ninety years old and ready for the cooling board, using a brand new Macintosh computer, and there you sit, twenty-two and gorgeous, fresh as a new peach, yet scrawling on a yellow legal pad like an old maid in a Victorian romance.

I knew nothing about the technique of story writing, and now, after eighteen years of writing, I still know nothing about the technique, although with the publication of my new novel, Tarzan and the Lost Empire, there are 31 books on my list.

Well, when I was a young writer the people we read were Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sartre, Camus, Celine, Malraux. And to begin with, I was a bit of a copycat writer and very derivative and tried to write a novel using their voices, really.... I keep it out of print.

I just grew up with it [The Simpsons]. The first season came on when I was 5, 6 years old, and the show evolved as I was growing up and got funnier and funnier and, by the time I was in 12th grade, they were at their funniest.

The most important thing about a technology is how it changes people.

National literature begins with fables and ends with novels.

The Simpsons will end as soon as Fox is able to find an 8 p.m. comedy hit to replace it - so I give us another 50 years.

The coming of the motion picture was as important as that of the printing press.

I've bought more music for my Ipod in one year than I bought in the last ten years of my life.

When they took TV to Fiji they found that after 3 years nearly 12 girls out of 100 were over the toilet bowls with bulimia because they felt inferior.

As a teenager, I read a lot of H.P. Lovecraft, so I wrote like H.P. Lovecraft. And in my 20s, I read a lot of Ross Macdonald and Raymond Chandler, so I wrote like those guys. But, little by little, you develop your own style.

There have been many accolades uttered about Elvis' talent and performances through the years, all of which I agree with wholeheartedly. I shall miss him dearly as a friend. He was a warm, considerate and generous man.

I don't have a cell phone (though for years I've kept saying, "soon").

I think it's really special to be a part of something that people are still watching or thinking about or interested in, or remember fondly many years later. I don't think it's annoying at all.

The second time I was banned was when I directed a film called Xiu Xiu. I was banned for three years from China.