Top 200 Charles Stross Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “The dirty little secret of publishing is that, all along, each book sold has had an average of 5 readers. That’s an 80% “piracy” rate if you insist on looking at it in those terms.”

— Charles Stross

102. “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

103. “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

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

— Charles Stross

105. “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

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

— Charles Stross

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

— Charles Stross

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

— Charles Stross

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

— Charles Stross

110. “The real world is devoid of narratives, after all. Narratives are just a thing that our brains do with facts in order to draw a line around the incomprehensible largeness of reality and wrestle it into something learnable and manipulable. Existence is devoid of plot, theme, and most of all moral.”

— Charles Stross

111. “Technologies are not neutral: they come with attached agendas, with associated ways of thinking. Industrial revolutions are inherently political revolutions.”

— Charles Stross

112. “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

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

— Charles Stross

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

— Charles Stross

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Charles Stross

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

— Charles Stross

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

— Charles Stross

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

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

— Charles Stross

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

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

— Charles Stross

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

— Charles Stross

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

— Charles Stross

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

— Charles Stross

134. “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

135. “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

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

— Charles Stross

137. “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

138. “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

139. “I wasn’t expecting a stealth, supersonic, vertical take-off submarine fueled by the eerily whistling ghosts of necromantically murdered dolphins.”

— Charles Stross

140. “The one thing that does happen, every time, though, is that I never get to write a book until I’ve already been thinking about it for a period of months to years.”

— Charles Stross

141. “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

142. “Can I remember “I remember lots,” I say. How much of what I remember is true is another matter.”

— Charles Stross

143. “Publishing is the final step in making a book; if I was afraid to publish one, I wouldn’t write it in the first place.”

— Charles Stross

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

— Charles Stross

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

— Charles Stross

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

— Charles Stross

147. “This is a woman who models herself on Margaret Thatcher, only without the warmth and compassion.”

— Charles Stross

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

— Charles Stross

149. “If an idea is compelling enough it’ll stick in my head until I am forced to write it. If it’s forgettable, who cares?”

— Charles Stross

150. “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