Literary Birthday – 17 July – Cory Doctorow

Happy Birthday, Cory Doctorow, born on 17 July 1971.

Cory Doctorow Quotes

1. The future’s a weirder place than we thought it would be when we were little kids.
2. 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.
3. For me — for pretty much every writer — the big problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.
4. Your problem is you’re trying to understand it. You need to just do it.
5. We are the people of the book. We love our books. We fill our houses with books. We treasure books we inherit from our parents, and we cherish the idea of passing those books on to our children. Indeed, how many of us started reading with a beloved book that belonged to one of our parents? We force worthy books on our friends, and we insist that they read them. We even feel a weird kinship for the people we see on buses or airplanes reading our books, the books that we claim. If anyone tries to take away our books—some oppressive government, some censor gone off the rails—we would defend them with everything that we have. We know our tribespeople when we visit their homes because every wall is lined with books. There are teetering piles of books beside the bed and on the floor; there are masses of swollen paperbacks in the bathroom. Our books are us. They are our outboard memory banks and they contain the moral, intellectual, and imaginative influences that make us the people we are today.
6. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.
7. 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.

Cory Doctorow is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, activist, and science fiction author. He maintains a daily blog at Pluralistic.net. He is the author of the Little Brother series. His latest novels are the hard science fiction Walkaway, and In Real Life. He also wrote The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction. He is an AD White Professor at Cornell University; an MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate; a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Open University; a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of North Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. In 2022, he earned the Sir Arthur Clarke Imagination in Service to Society Awardee for lifetime achievement. Visit his website. Follow him on Bluesky.

Source for photo by Jonathan Worth, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (attribute to JonathanWorth.com)

by Amanda Patterson
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