Daily Inspiration Quote by Cory Doctorow

Doctorow’s line quietly flips the usual hierarchy: fiction isn’t an escape from “real work,” it’s the diagnostic tool that makes the rest of his work possible. Coming from a writer-activist who spends as much time arguing about DRM, monopoly power, and platform governance as he does inventing futures, the admission lands as both practical and revealing. He’s not romanticizing the muse; he’s describing a workflow. The novel becomes a lab where hunches, anxieties, and contradictions can be stress-tested at full scale.

The key move is the phrase “find out what’s going on in my own head.” That’s a subtle rejection of the idea that the author is a self-transparent creature who simply transcribes beliefs. Doctorow frames his mind as something partially unknown, even to him, and the long form as the only instrument big enough to measure it. Essays and arguments reward certainty and speed; novels demand consequence. A position that sounds clean in a column gets dirty when it has to survive characters, incentives, collateral damage.

The second sentence adds a telling note of self-justification: “useful and indeed critical” and “as many of these other things as I do.” It’s the voice of someone whose calendar is crowded with public-facing urgency, insisting that interior work is not indulgence but infrastructure. In a culture that treats productivity as proof of seriousness, Doctorow is arguing that narrative is his way of staying honest - not just about the world he critiques, but about the motives and blind spots he brings to the critique.