Top 200 Charles Stross Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “Back to my question: is it better to reign in Hell – or should I aspire to be a citizen in the early years of a better nation?”

— Charles Stross

154. “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

155. “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

156. “The Denizen of Number 10 is the avatar – the humanoid sock-puppet – of an ancient and undying intelligence who regards mere humanity much as we might regard a hive of bees. Our lives are of no individual concern to Him, but He likes honey.”

— Charles Stross

157. “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

158. “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

159. “There isn’t very much of the little boy left in Oscar; he didn’t get to his position without being able to keep it under very tight control.”

— Charles Stross

160. “We were created for a world where the rule of law did not extend to our kind, and our earliest templates were trained and triaged, so that only the obedient survived. Just imagining the act of disobeying an instruction from one of our Creators can bring about physically disturbing symptoms – Then they all died. And the society we built for ourselves in the twilit afterlife of their world, using the rules they laid out for us, is diseased.”

— Charles Stross

161. “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

162. “It’s usually quite easy to shrug and write something else instead.”

— Charles Stross

163. “If I write too much of anything for too long, I burn out on it. So it helps to vary my output from year to year.”

— Charles Stross

164. “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

165. “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

166. “Just as individuals age and die, so do lineages: Only debt is forever.”

— Charles Stross

167. “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

168. “We’re going to need swords: lots of swords.”

— Charles Stross

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

— Charles Stross

170. “My agent is based in New York. And due to a historic accident, my publishing track is primarily American – I’m sold into the UK almost as a foreign import! So I’m quite out of touch with what’s going on in UK publishing.”

— Charles Stross

171. “The icky part was knowing I was in the presence of a woman so crazy that she thought her highest calling was to incubate encapsulated alien teratomas until they came squirting out of her body and walked around on their own legs. I have heard of some bizarre vocations in my life, but seldom anything quite so disgusting.”

— Charles Stross

172. “It’s the kind of outfit one wears in the hope of meeting someone who’ll help you out of it.”

— Charles Stross

173. “To put it bluntly, there are too many humans on this planet. Six-billion-plus primates. And we think too loudly. Our brains are neurocomputers, incredibly complex. The more observers there are, the more quantum weirdness is observed, and the more inconsistencies creep into our reality.”

— Charles Stross

174. “The bastard knows I need to know what he knows and he knows I can’t say no.”

— Charles Stross

175. “Experiments in digitizing and running neural wetware under emulation are well established; some radical libertarians claim that, as the technology matures, death with its draconian curtailment of property and voting rights will become the biggest civil rights issue of all.”

— Charles Stross

176. “Biggest influence: my mother.”

— Charles Stross

177. “I began my first novel when I was 15. It went through three drafts, of around 40,000 words each. If I find it, I’ll burn it.”

— Charles Stross

178. “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

179. “I passed through this stage years ago on Venus, where I was so unfashionable that eventually I almost convinced myself I no longer cared that nobody wanted me; but recent events have reawakened my need for intimacy.”

— Charles Stross

180. “I shake my head. The EQUESTRIAN.”

— Charles Stross

181. “Rich, powerful, white alpha males who dress up in gimp suits and beat up ethnically diverse lower-class criminals.”

— Charles Stross

182. “It was one of ours originally, but no human being can sprint around a building with their helmet off and backpack missing in a fimbulwinter cold enough to freeze liquid oxygen.”

— Charles Stross

183. “The PM smiles, and for a moment I see a flickering vision where His face should be: an onion-skin Matryoshka doll of circular shark-toothed maws, lizard-man faces, and insectile hunger. “A word in my study if you don’t mind. Right this way.”

— Charles Stross

184. “I have no policy, for or against: only a personal style. Which is to say, I use them when I think it’s appropriate to; for example, an internal monologue by a locquacious and verbose narrator is more likely to be larded with adverbs than an exchange of instant messages between cops at a crime scene.”

— Charles Stross

185. “If you’re a humble believer set on doing your deity’s will, then what are you doing spending the take on Lamborghinis and single malt?”

— Charles Stross

186. “The encapsulated bird your conspirators sent you to fetch. The sterilized male chicken with the Creator DNA sequences. The plot capon. Where is it?”

— Charles Stross

187. “The programmers have another saying: ‘The question of whether a machine can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.’”

— Charles Stross

188. “More often than not, piracy is a symptom of an under-provisioned market.”

— Charles Stross

189. “We remain convinced that this is the best defensive posture to adopt in order to minimize casualties when the Great Old Ones return from beyond the stars to eat our brains.”

— Charles Stross

190. “We developed differently, of course, but we all had the same problem.” The yawning hole in the center of our badly designed lives. “How can you love yourself if you can’t love somebody else?”

— Charles Stross

191. “Horror fiction allows us to confront and sublimate our fears of an uncontrollable universe, but the threat verges on the overwhelming and may indeed carry the protagonists away. Spy fiction in contrast allows us to believe for a while that the little people can, by obtaining secret knowledge, acquire some leverage over the overwhelming threats that permeate their universe.”

— Charles Stross

192. “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

193. “They’re nuts. Completely insane! I don’t get this gambling thing. Didn’t these people study statistics at university? Evidently not.”

— Charles Stross

194. “IF ONE WISHES to live to a ripe old age, there are certain activities one should avoid. Chief among these is eating anything larger than one’s own head – but not so very far down the list is any activity that involves clambering around the outside of a spaceship.”

— Charles Stross

195. “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

196. “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

197. “Jupiter is a gibbous streaky horror riding across the zenith of the night black sky – it.”

— Charles Stross

198. “So once again Janice proves that not only is she a nerd, she’s a useful nerd who gets to stay on the team.”

— Charles Stross

199. “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

200. “Everything – the entire 400-megabuck investment, ten years of Company black operations – depends on what happens in the next few hours.”

— Charles Stross