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"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."
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"A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn't telling, or teaching, or ordering. Rather, he seeks to establish a relationship with meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all our live trying to be less lonesome. And one of our ancient methods is to tell a story, begging the listener to say, and to feel, "Yes, that's the way it is, or at least that's the way I feel it. You're not as alone as you thought." To finish is sadness to a writer, a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn't really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done."

"Certainly the plagiarism, and dealing with the fallout of it, was the most difficult thing I've ever faced since I started writing."

"Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do- to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street."

"T[he rules of writing] require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others."

"I believe the first draft of a book - even a long one - should take no more than three months. Any longer and - for me, at least - the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity."

"Some people write letters, in the library."

"In the middle section of the book Mirabelle breaks into not one, but two houses near Belgravia Books. I had fun scoping these out - checking which windows looked least secure and figuring out how to scale the mews houses to the rear to get her inside. A man came out at one point, 'What are you doing?' he questioned me. 'The thing is, I'm writing a book,' I started with a smile. He waved me off, his hand as wide as a tennis racket. 'Everyone is writing a book, my dear,' he said. Between you and I, it's his house that MIrabelle ends up breaking into."
Explore more quotes by Cory Doctorow

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."
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