Top 200 Charles Stross Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence or overwork?”

— Charles Stross

102. “An important factor to note is that it’s rare for anyone to sell a first novel written before they turned 30-35; long-format fiction tends to require a bunch of experience of human life that takes time to acquire. So your average mid-career novelist is in their forties to fifties!”

— Charles Stross

103. “Death is really no more than the voluntary liquidation of an economy of microscopic free agents, the redemption of the debt of structured life.”

— Charles Stross

104. “Nobody taught me how to say no when a beautiful naked woman begs me to take my clothes off.”

— Charles Stross

105. “A religious college in Cairo is considering issues of nanotechnology: If replicators are used to prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be treated?”

— Charles Stross

106. “The late 90s were crazy science-fictional if you were inside the superheated steam bubble of the dot-com 1.0 industry.”

— Charles Stross

107. “While writing a novel I almost completely stop reading books in the same sub-genre for the duration.”

— Charles Stross

108. “Starships are all work and no fun.”

— Charles Stross

109. “I don’t want to permanently damage myself! On the other hand, a couple of days off the keyboard tends to make things somewhat better.”

— Charles Stross

110. “I have not watched the TV show. I do not generally watch TV sci-fi drama shows. They make me itch.”

— Charles Stross

111. “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

112. “What better way to weaken a powerful enemy than to get it fighting itself?”

— Charles Stross

113. “For instance, I never wrote to my MP to express my displeasure at the widespread deployment of sleeping policemen around the capital. It never occurred to me to do so: Mo and I don’t own a car, and speed bumps.”

— Charles Stross

114. “Personal pride is probably a bad guide to merit.”

— Charles Stross

115. “Books bound in human skin and written in a formal propositional calculus where each axiom was a closure wrapped around eternal damnation.”

— Charles Stross

116. “There’s a very loud noise in my ear, not unlike a cat sneezing, if the cat is the size of the Great Sphinx of Giza and it’s just inhaled three tons of snuff.”

— Charles Stross

117. “I write almost entlirely on Macs, because: Windows gives me hives.”

— Charles Stross

118. “I notice that Andy is watching our exchange with the still, silent fascination of a fly on the wall that is canny enough to be aware of the existence of swatters.”

— Charles Stross

119. “The trouble is, if you go too far towards being polite, the label that applies is “doormat”.”

— Charles Stross

120. “The dirty little secret of the intelligence-gathering job is that information doesn’t just want to be free – it wants to hang out on street corners wearing gang colors and terrorizing the neighbors.”

— Charles Stross

121. “One does not simply walk into Mordor these days; one drives a rented Cadillac Escalade the size of a county, shiny black and chrome, with a fake walnut dash, and enough black leather to clothe a battalion of Hell’s Angels.”

— Charles Stross

122. “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

123. “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

124. “We loved them individually so much that we betrayed them collectively.”

— Charles Stross

125. “I feel ill with emotional indigestion: I don’t think I’ve ever felt for Mo the kind of raw, priapic lust I feel for Ramona, but Ramona is a poisonous bloom – off-limits if I value my life.”

— Charles Stross

126. “I like lassic British spy thrillers. Seriously. If the cold war was still on, that’s something I’d be writing.”

— Charles Stross

127. “I argued for a Kindle but they pointed out that if it could be associated with me, then the information bleed – Amazon logging every page turn and annotation – was a potential security hazard. Not to mention the darker esoteric potential of spending too much time staring at a device controlled by a secretive billionaire in Seattle. The void stares also, and so on.”

— Charles Stross

128. “Gordon actually wore the company uniform as if he meant it, unlike Bill, who occupied his uniform like a hermit crab living in an abandoned Coke can.”

— Charles Stross

129. “In general, a little controversy isn’t harmful: if anything, it gets people interested.”

— Charles Stross

130. “Edinburgh has history the way cats have bad breath.”

— Charles Stross

131. “Someday I’ll write a textbook about personality profiling through possessions; but for now let’s just say this example is screaming “megalomaniac!” at me.”

— Charles Stross

132. “His remit will be to monitor the use of reality-modification weapons by both sides in the conflict and to assure the civilized worlds that the New Republic does not engage in gratuitous use of time travel as a weapon of mass destruction.”

— Charles Stross

133. “Had enough of my poetry yet? That’s why they pay me to fight demons instead.”

— Charles Stross

134. “It has so much character that it’s probably being hunted by a posse of typographers.”

— Charles Stross

135. “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

136. “If I forget, then it might as well never have happened. Memory is liberty.”

— Charles Stross

137. “The chip that functions abnormally will be desoldered, as they say.”

— Charles Stross

138. “Sociopath” was one of the most useful concepts that Miriam’s Memetic Engineering Task Force had imported from the United States: Erasmus’s Propaganda Ministry had been working overtime to raise awareness of it as an Anti-Democratic Problem: “People who think People are Things.”

— Charles Stross

139. “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

140. “We are Bay Aryans from Berkeley: prepare to be reengineered in an attractive range of color schemes for your safety and comfort!”

— Charles Stross

141. “Are you a psychiatrist?” “I don’t think so.” He shuffles forward, heading towards a side bay that, as I approach it, turns out to be a day room of some sort. “Then I’m not Napoleon Bonaparte!”

— Charles Stross

142. “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

143. “American cops are so heavily militarized these days that the only way I can tell the difference between them and the army is the color of their body armor – that, and the army is less trigger-happy.”

— Charles Stross

144. “You’ll still get guys with an array of badges to demonstrate their importance, but that just excludes people. I think fandom is more inclusive now.”

— Charles Stross

145. “For a sampler, you could try my short story collection “Wireless”. Which contains one novella that scooped a Locus award, and one that won a Hugo, and covers a range of different styles.”

— Charles Stross

146. “Twelve percent of all the photographs ever taken in human history have been taken in the last twelve months. And 40 percent of them are on Facebook.”

— Charles Stross

147. “I grew up on second hand bookshops and libraries.”

— Charles Stross

148. “Writing novels takes up about 100% of my available working time.”

— Charles Stross

149. “Reasons for cancellation order: 1. Baby-eating aquatic faerie equines do not exist.”

— Charles Stross

150. “This document describes progress to date in establishing a defensive network capable of repelling wide-scale incursions by reconfiguring the national closed-circuit television surveillance network as a software-controlled look-to-kill multiheaded basilisk. To.”

— Charles Stross