Esther Dyson

My greatest vulnerability is that I'm not 'normal.' I'm not married, I don't have children. It's something I feel defensive about.

Since I was 18, I have swum for 50 minutes every day, missing less than one day a year except for a two-week stint when I was training as a cosmonaut in Baikonur, Kazakhstan, in March 2009.

I have had the same apartment in New York City for almost 40 years but have actually lived in it for less than half of that time, owing to a busy travel schedule.

As long as a government can come and shoot you, you can't jump on the Internet to freedom.

Indeed, though people increasingly learn and interact online, we retain a fundamental need to engage in person.

It may not always be profitable at first for businesses to be online, but it is certainly going to be unprofitable not to be online.

Don't leave hold of your common sense. Think about what you're doing and how the technology can enhance it. Don't think about technology first.

Part of the problem is when we bring in a new technology we expect it to be perfect in a way that we don't expect the world that we're familiar with to be perfect.

I've seen disgusting excess in business, and I've seen disgusting excess in Washington. But at the same time, I've certainly learned that Washington matters and that you can't ignore it, especially when you get into telecom.

I became the research department for a firm on Wall Street and eventually started working on the newsletter 'Release 1.0,' which I ran for 25 years. That was how I learned all about PCs and the Internet.

In the sense that people who produce things and work get rewarded, statistically. You don't get rewarded precisely for your effort, but in Russia you got rewarded for being alive, but not very well rewarded.

I think copyright is moral, proper. I think a creator has the right to control the disposition of his or her works - I actually believe that the financial issue is less important than the integrity of the work, the attribution, that kind of stuff.