Top 100 Charles Stross Quotes
#1. Anyway, you don't have to be terribly intelligent to complete a PhD," Karim grumps. "You just need to be stupidly persistent. If anything, being too smart gets in the way -
Charles Stross
#2. What I'm hoping for is something that goes much, much further than the conservative enablers of dog-eat-dog capitalism putting on a puppet show of cleaning house. But that's probably not going to happen just yet ...
Charles Stross
#4. Book depository is nothing new; there've been outlets selling books internationally via mail order for many decades - the only change is that it's now easier to find and use such services.
Charles Stross
#5. (A WOMBAT is a Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time: the non-IT equivalent of a PEBCAK. (A PEBCAK is a Problem that Exists Between Chair And Keyboard. (You get the picture: it's parenthesized despair all the way down.)))
Charles Stross
#6. They're nuts. Completely insane! I don't get this gambling thing. Didn't these people study statistics at university? Evidently not
Charles Stross
#7. We loved them individually so much that we betrayed them collectively.
Charles Stross
#8. You take after your dad, a high-functioning sociopath with an incurable organic personality disorder. It's one of the special-sauce variety, the kind with a known genetic cause. Your uncle Albert was something different, and worse: He was a man of faith.
Charles Stross
#10. Scientific research is a bottomless money pit. You can approximate Doing Science to standing on the Crack of Doom throwing banknotes down it by the double-handful, in the hope that if you choke the volcano with enough paper it will cough up the One Ring.
Charles Stross
#11. I write more for the children of the computer revolution, who are also interested in speculation and exploring the human condition, but approach it from an information perspective.
Charles Stross
#12. And because this is now a political problem, the usual political syllogism applies: (a) is a problem: Something Must Be Done, (b) is Something, Therefore (b) Must Be Done.
Charles Stross
#13. Is not happening yet," contributes Boris. "Singularity implies infinite rate of change achieved momentarily. Future not amenable thereafter to prediction by presingularity beings, right? So has not happened.
Charles Stross
#14. History is another country and might be full of fascinating incidents and places to go visit - but as a destination for emigration, it has some problems!
Charles Stross
#15. The bastard knows I need to know what he knows and he knows I can't say no.
Charles Stross
#16. One of the quirkier cognitive disorders to which software project management is prone.
Charles Stross
#17. Let's see.' She fiddles with her terminal and the room card reader. 'You're in 403 and 404. Have a nice day.'
I hand Persephone the Forbidden Room card and keep Room Not Found for myself. She looks at me oddly.
Charles Stross
#18. You can collar criminals until the cows come home, and there'll still be a never-ending supply of greedy fuckwits and chancers.
Charles Stross
#19. Superman, Iron Man, Batman" - Flyaway Hair winces visibly - "you name it. Rich, powerful, white alpha males who dress up in gimp suits and beat up ethnically diverse lower-class criminals.
Charles Stross
#20. Britain is relatively compact and much closer to the borders of the U.S.S.R. than anywhere in North America.
Charles Stross
#21. There is a point at which eccentricity begins to impact operational effectiveness.
Charles Stross
#22. I shove my reading matter back into my messenger bag (it's a novel about a private magician for hire in Chicago - your taxpayer pounds at work) and go to stand in the doorway.
Charles Stross
#23. Just as individuals age and die, so do lineages: Only debt is forever.
Charles Stross
#24. Fiction is about human beings, first and foremost. (It's not impossible to write fiction with no human protagonists, but it's very hard to keep the reader interested ... )
Charles Stross
#25. You know, if I tried to change the minds of everyone who I thought needed changing, I'd never have time to do anything else.
Charles Stross
#26. Alas, yes. Unfortunately our little canary has gone Section 2 on us. He's absolutely Upney;* halfway to Dagenham, in fact. We're keeping him here because he's not deemed a hazard to himself, but so far he's confessed to assassinating Margaret Thatcher -
Charles Stross
#27. There is cold comfort to be drawn from the sure and certain knowledge that the correct way to deal with the problem you're facing in your job involves napalm, if
Charles Stross
#28. What I've learned during my life is that the near future is 90% identical to the present - if you buy a new car today, it'll probably still be on the road in 2022.
Charles Stross
#29. When you stare into the void, the void stares also; but if you cast into the void, you get a type conversion error.
Charles Stross
#30. I wrote two million words of crap. Maybe I'm just a slow learner .
Charles Stross
#31. you young ones . . ." 'Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country has ever done for you?
Charles Stross
#32. You've just spent an entire prehistoric human lifetime as an ice ghoul and people are needling you for having too many arms?" I shake my head. "I just assume you have a good reason.
Charles Stross
#33. Well then. Will the naysayers please leave the universe?
Charles Stross
#34. Humans: such a brilliant model of emotional self-awareness.
Charles Stross
#35. If I was a Marxist I'd call it the crisis of capitalism. Even though I'm not a Marxist, that seems like a not unreasonable term for the widening gap between the rich and poor that we're seeing ...
Charles Stross
#36. A young filly is leading her mater in. They're both wearing green wellies, and there's something so indefinably horsey about them that I have to pinch myself and remember that were-ponies do not exist outside the pages of a certain bestselling kid-lit series.
Charles Stross
#37. The business of fiction is the study of the human condition, and gender is something that many humans are obsessed with, thus making it rather difficult to ignore when studying the human condition!
Charles Stross
#38. We use committees for all the ulterior purposes for which they might have been designed: diffusion of executive responsibility, plausible deniability, misdirection, providing the appearance of activity without the substance, and protecting the guilty.
Charles Stross
#39. I don't mind going without clothes, but being without a microprocessor is truly stripping down. It's like asking a sorcerer to surrender his magic wand, or a politician to forswear his lies.
Charles Stross
#40. I was Computer Shopper's linux columnist for more than half a decade, from the late 90s onwards. Yes, I know about Linux. (My first review of a Linux distro in the press was published in late 1996.)
Charles Stross
#41. There are good ways and bad ways to get my attention. Whacking on my ego with a crowbar will get my attention, sure, but it's not going to leave me well disposed to the messenger.
Charles Stross
#42. Like the famous mad philosopher said, when you stare into the void, the void stares also; but if you cast into the void, you get a type conversion error. (Which just goes to show Nietzsche wasn't a C++ programmer.)
Charles Stross
#43. It turns out that the killer application for virtual reality is other human beings. Build a world that people want to inhabit, and the inhabitants will come.
Charles Stross
#44. I'm a fuzzy-headed warm-hearted liberal, and I think fuzzy-headed warm-hearted liberalism is an ideological stance that needs defending-if necessary, with a hob-nailed boot-kick to the bollocks of budding totalitarianism.
Charles Stross
#45. It's the kind of outfit one wears in the hope of meeting someone who'll help you out of it
Charles Stross
#46. Of course I grew it in a fucking tank! What do you think I am, a farmer?
Charles Stross
#47. I'd like to be proven wrong firstly on the difficulty of building a self-sustaining closed circuit ecosystem in space that can support human life.
Charles Stross
#48. (What band does the necromancer dance to? Boney M.)
Charles Stross
#49. A historian who works for a bank: That's not the most likely background for someone who capers around the cosmos having adventures, is it?
Charles Stross
#50. The ads made me feel bilious and love-stricken, invaded and debauched by a coldly mechanical lust for whatever fetish the desire machines were pushing at their victims at any given instant.
Charles Stross
#52. The real challenge in this line of work is being able to weed the productive ones from the chaff, to decide which you're going to spend the next six to nine months turning into something that people will pay for.
Charles Stross
#53. We're currently living with a generation of established novelists who are embarrassingly out of date with respect to social networking, internet skills, and so on.
Charles Stross
#54. There will be plenty of backup and support, but she's still going to have to do heartbreaking things to people who probably don't understand why the pale woman with the bone-white violin and blood dripping from her fingertips is coming for them.
Charles Stross
#55. There are rumors about the depraved and perverted practices of the pulchritudinous protestant puritan plutocratic penis-people priesthood, of shadowy bacchanalian polyamorous practices ... I suspect, to be blunt, someone was blackmailing him.
Charles Stross
#56. They'll like it even less if I hear any words from them, I said. You have to be firm with colonial troops: they have only as much backbone as their commanding officer.
Charles Stross
#57. I was heavily into AD&D in my teens (late 1970s-early 1980s) but fell off the RPG habit in the mid-80s and have never gone back to it; my lifestyle today isn't very compatible with having a regular gaming group (too much travel).
Charles Stross
#58. It popped up on my Outlook calendar, flagged in red like an inflamed pimple full of infected bureaucratic pus ... I've been trying desperately to get it shifted, but no, it is stuck like a king-sized dildo in a guinea pig.
Charles Stross
#59. Because if there's one thing worse than an IT manager who's feeling the chill wind of obsolescence blowing down his neck and consequently trying to contribute code to the repository like an actual working developer, it's an IT manager who's getting creative.
Charles Stross
#60. Clegg, Miliband, Farage resigning (rumours that they are to be the new Top Gear line-up cannot be confirmed at this time).
Charles Stross
#61. I have not watched the TV show. I do not generally watch TV sci-fi drama shows. They make me itch.
Charles Stross
#62. There's a faint popping noise, and the entire wall of the incident room shifts to the colour of the night sky above a Japanese city.
Charles Stross
#63. First and most importantly, death is just the absence of life - oh, and for human beings, the absence of consciousness, too, but not just the absence of consciousness, the absence of the capacity for consciousness.
Charles Stross
#64. Loose lips don't merely sink ships, they summon krakens with too many tentacles.
Charles Stross
#65. Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.
Charles Stross
#66. I have a CS degree and a history that includes working as a software developer and being a computer magazine columnist back during the 1990s. I guess I simply paid attention to the social effects of the IT revolution as I lived through it.
Charles Stross
#67. A vision from a universe where the Equal Rights Amendment
with its redefinition of personhood
is rejected by the house of deputies: A universe where to die is to become property and to be created outwith a gift of parental DNA is to be doomed to slavery.
Charles Stross
#69. We have chickens! And ostriches - they're like a chicken, only bigger! One of my colleagues is working on a Tyrannosaur - that's like a really huge chicken, with teeth - but for architectural reasons we can't let it roam free just yet.
Charles Stross
#70. Manfred used to be a flock of pigeons
literally, his exocortex dispersed among a passel of bird brains, pecking at brightly colored facts, shitting semidigested conclusions. Being human again feels inexplicably odd. (331)
Charles Stross
#71. There's no briefing sheet on what to do when a supernatural soul-sucking horror disguised as a beautiful woman starts crying on your shoulder.
Charles Stross
#72. My computer terminal whistles at me: YOU HAVE MAIL. No shit, Sherlock, I always have mail. It's an existential thing: if I don't have mail it would mean that something is very wrong with the world
Charles Stross
#73. I don't think most of my opinions, political or social, are so far outside of the mainstream that they'd cause massive outrage on a scale liable to provoke death threats or referrals to prosecutors for outraging public decency, so why worry?
Charles Stross
#74. Fatal accidents never happen because of just one mistake. It takes a whole chain of stupids lining up just so to put a full stop at the end of an epitaph.
Charles Stross
#75. The Rapture of the Nerds has been followed by the Resurrection of the Extremely Confused. (318)
Charles Stross
#76. Old Enochian running on neural wetware is not the fastest procedural language ever invented, and it's semantics make AppleScript look like a thing of elegance and beauty
Charles Stross
#77. I think that if there's one key insight science can bring to fiction, it's that fiction - the study of the human condition - needs to broaden its definition of the human condition. Because the human condition isn't immutable and doomed to remain uniform forever.
Charles Stross
#78. Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint. And that's just scratching the surface ...
Charles Stross
#79. the first law of demonology is that if you can see it, it can see you. But
Charles Stross
#80. Like I said: the only god I believe in is coming back. And when he arrives, I'll be waiting with a shotgun.
Charles Stross
#81. Any sufficiently advanced lingerie is indistinguishable from a lethal weapon.
Charles Stross
#82. What better way to weaken a powerful enemy than to get it fighting itself?
Charles Stross
#83. I don't have a license to kill, but I don't have orders not to kill in the course of my duties, either. Which realization I find extremely disturbing;
Charles Stross
#84. The male ego is a curious thing. It's about the size of a small continent but it's extremely brittle.
Charles Stross
#85. My gut feeling is that SF as we know it today is actually a heavily propagandized field that grew out of a specific set of cultural trends running in the USA and Europe between 1918 and 1950, during the post-imperial modernization period.
Charles Stross
#86. They need a social mechanism to make us require conformity of one other, and the best way to do that is to provide a mechanism to make us punish our own deviants.
Charles Stross
#87. Not to mention Graceless, Pointless, Feckless and Aimless, who are all under-producing and their milk is sour and they won't go anywhere near the yard.
Charles Stross
#88. I am me and I have been Juliette and both of us have dreamed this dream repeatedly. And what makes this dream so unfortunate is that it is a true thing that happened to someone else ... who is both of us.
Charles Stross
#89. Any replacement to the current copyright position (life plus 70 years) needs to have an answer lined up for this, and similar, messy edge cases.
Charles Stross
#90. You want to know what it's like to emigrate to Saturn system? Imagine spending six years in a straitjacket tied to the outside of a skyscraper, with only a couple dozen similar lunatics for company.
Charles Stross
#91. Reasons for cancellation order: 1. Baby-eating aquatic faerie equines do not exist.
Charles Stross
#92. Fiction is the study of the human condition under imagined circumstances.
Charles Stross
#93. Bob loses saving throw vs. shiny with a penalty of -5. Bob takes 2d8 damage to the credit card.
Charles Stross
#94. The idiot child they've placed on the throne does not impress with his acumen.
Charles Stross
#96. I tend to work on the principle that much humour relies on cognitive dissonance - on the foreground not matching the background, on the protagonist's response to a situation being inappropriate, and so on.
Charles Stross
#97. Would you mind finding Eileen and asking her why she's late? It doesn't normally take her this long to terminate an employee.
Charles Stross
#98. If I wanted to be in movies, I'd have gone into scriptwriting: the fact that I write novels should be a big hint about what I prefer to do!
Charles Stross
#99. OF COURSE, SPACE travel isn't only about being stuffed into a claustrophobia-inducing cell, scared witless, trussed up in a restraint harness, and raped through every orifice for years on end. Because, you know, if that was all there was to it, there'd be a queue outside every travel agent.
Charles Stross
#100. What I read: while I'm writing, I tend to go off reading fiction for relaxation - especially the challenging stuff. It's too much like the day job.
Charles Stross
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
