Art & Creativity Quote by Cory Doctorow

Doctorow’s shrugging opener - "Well, I don't know" - is doing tactical work. It reads like modesty, but it’s also a hedge against the expectation that authors must deliver a clean, marketable thesis about their own art. He’s a journalist by trade and a novelist by reputation, which means he’s fluent in the rituals of interviews: the careful undercutting of certainty, the refusal to sound like a salesman, the awareness that any confident claim will be clipped into a pull-quote and used against him.

Then he pivots to measurable bravado. Length becomes a proxy for risk: "longer than both of the other books put together" isn’t just a factoid, it’s a receipt. Ambition is framed not as prestige but as scale, labor, stamina - the kind of credibility you can tally. That’s a very Doctorow move: quantify first, philosophize second.

The real tell is the phrase "get under the skin of the people". He’s not talking about worldbuilding or plot mechanics; he’s talking about penetration. It suggests a turn from systems to subjects: less idea-forward polemic, more interiority, more moral mess, more characters who don’t function as elegant arguments. For a writer associated with big political concerns (copyright, surveillance, networked power), this is a claim of intimacy as a new form of seriousness.

The subtext is competitive, too: the earlier books were warm-ups, maybe even prototypes. This one aims to leave bruises, not just footprints.