Charles Stross Quotes

I have time to write 1-2 novels per year, and get roughly novel-sized ideas every month. I have to perform triage on my own writing impulses.

My favourite movie is: "Dr Strangelove". (I haven't seen any films released in the past 2-5 years, I'm afraid: I don't do TV/cinema).

I don't keep anything on paper (except within an actual novel in progress, at which point I need a file to keep track of plot threads, characters, and so on).

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.

Biggest influence: my mother.

I don't do flash fiction.

I drink tea pretty much continuously at a rate of around 1 imperial pint/hour, which sort of enforces screen/keyboard breaks.

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.

When I do get to chow down on a book, I try to read ones that are nothing like what I'm writing. So, as I'm currently working on a space opera (of sorts) I'm mostly indulging in urban fantasy.

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.

To boldly go where no uploaded metahuman colony has gone before' has a certain ring to it, doesn't it?

Can I remember "I remember lots," I say. How much of what I remember is true is another matter.

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!

I wrote two million words of crap. Maybe I'm just a slow learner .

I don't do football. (Grew up in Leeds in the 1970s. Football there was indellibly associated with the National Front, i.e. violent fascist skinheads.)

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.

I'm an atheist .I was raised in British reform Judaism, which is not like American reform Judaism, much less any other strain of organised religion. So: no cults here.

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

The Magician's Land is a triumphant climax to the best fantasy trilogy of the decade.

Starships are all work and no fun.

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

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

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.

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.

A dark-skinned human with four arms walks toward me across the floor of the club, clad only in a belt strung with human skulls.

Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity.

Where would dictators be without our compliant amnesia? Make the collective lose its memory, you can conceal anything.

No two books come out the same way. Some I write by the seat of my pants; others are planned in minute detail.

Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy.

[Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.]

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.

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.

Time is a corrosive fluid, dissolving motivation, destroying novelty, and leaching the joy from life.

--but I find her personality annoying. It's like being molested by a sleeping bag that speaks in Comic Sans with little love-hearts over the i's.

Well then. Will the naysayers please leave the universe?

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.

The rules of physics are, in some cases, suspiciously anthropic.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a sane employee in possession of his wits must be in want of a good manager.

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

Bob loses saving throw vs. shiny with a penalty of -5. Bob takes 2d8 damage to the credit card.

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

Although I am unconvinced that I desire life, I am not yet ready to embrace death.

This has serveral consequences, starting with screwing over most cryptography algorithms--translation: all your bank account are belong to us--

I am the Eschaton. I am not your God.I am descended from you, and exist in your future.Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.

The five stages of bureaucratic grieving are: denial, anger, committee meetings, scapegoating, and cover-up.

Identity is theft, don’t trust anyone whose state vector hasn’t forked for more than a gigasecond, change is the only constant, et bloody cetera.

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.

I let the happy times slip through my fingers and gripped on to the sad times as if they were my heart's desire

Only debt is forever.

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.