Charles Stross Quotes

Clegg, Miliband, Farage resigning (rumours that they are to be the new Top Gear line-up cannot be confirmed at this time).

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.

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.

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

We shouldn't even be here, I think distantly as I raise my weapon and take aim, we're management, not heroes.

Personal pride is probably a bad guide to merit.

Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy.

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.

Pay attention: There will be an exam later.

Humans: such a brilliant model of emotional self-awareness.

A mother's love - "
"Fuck love," Amber snarls, "she wants power.

I spent six hours becoming one with a shrubbery last night. There were three cloudbursts and a rain of small and very confused frogs

I don't do flash fiction.

Politics is shit; it corrupts everything it touches ...

For programming is a job where Lovecraft meets tradecraft, all the time.

Biggest influence: my mother.

Jupiter is a gibbous streaky horror riding across the zenith of the night black sky - it

Down in the park with a friend called Five.

Never bring a knife to a gun fight, I tell Mr. Crispy as I turn away from him. His right arm thinks about it for a moment, then falls off.

We loved them individually so much that we betrayed them collectively.

The seeds of evil usually germinated in the footprints of people who knew how everybody else ought to behave and felt the need to tell them so.

In memory of Terry Pratchett,
who showed us all how it's done

I do not click on random youtube videos.

I can get you a cheaper ticket if you let me amputate your legs: I can even take your thighs as a deposit, said the travel agent.

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

The bastard knows I need to know what he knows and he knows I can't say no.

I'm not mad, you know, although it helps in this line of work.

the destiny of intelligent tool-using life was to be a stepping-stone in the evolution of corporate instruments.

It's the kind of outfit one wears in the hope of meeting someone who'll help you out of it

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.

If you're going to write for a living, you should find something fun to write.

The domes and dildos of pressurized buildings cast slowly lengthening shadows.

Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again.

I shake my head. The EQUESTRIAN

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;

But, as Andy pointed out, if being a smart-arse was an offence, the Laundry would not exist in the first place.

Demonstrating the importance of being Ernst as the marketing department put it.

Novels are one of the few remaining areas of narrative storytelling where one person does almost all of the creative heavy lifting.

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.

Any sufficiently advanced lingerie is indistinguishable from a lethal weapon.

Never trust a man who thinks his religion gives him all the answers.

Of course I grew it in a fucking tank! What do you think I am, a farmer?

Only debt is forever.

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

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.

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

a man cannot make himself believe a lie just because it profits him. Men

So you're saying, we've got a, a shoggoth gap?

The informational density of the inner planets is visibly converging on Avogadro's number of bits per mole, one bit per atom,

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

You can collar criminals until the cows come home, and there'll still be a never-ending supply of greedy fuckwits and chancers.

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

I grew up on second hand bookshops and libraries.

One of the quirkier cognitive disorders to which software project management is prone.

The problem with ebook filesharing is simply one of scale. But I think the "piracy" problem is massively over-rated.

When you stare into the void, the void stares also; but if you cast into the void, you get a type conversion error.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Georgina darts forward, grabs my hand, and pumps it up and down while peering at my face as if she's wondering why water isn't gushing from my mouth.

the first law of demonology is that if you can see it, it can see you. But

They never tell you how heavy a corpse is in training school.

Christmas: the one time of year when you can't avoid the nuts in your family muesli.

The male ego is a curious thing. It's about the size of a small continent but it's extremely brittle.

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

What you or I would recognize as an alien invasion by tentacled horrors from beyond spacetime Angleton would see as a teachable moment.

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

That was what we call in the trade an Unscheduled Reality Excursion, usually abbreviated to 'Oh fuck.'

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

Money is a symptom of poverty, after all, and Manfred never has to pay for anything.

Some say the Internet is for porn but you know that in truth the Internet is for spam.

Like I said: the only god I believe in is coming back. And when he arrives, I'll be waiting with a shotgun.

I stared at him. You're a bat, Rudi! She's a mermaid. What were you thinking?

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

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.

We are, after all, homo economicus.

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

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

What better way to weaken a powerful enemy than to get it fighting itself?

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

you young ones . . ." 'Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country has ever done for you?

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.

She paused, staring into the void. The void, for its part, stared back unblinking.

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

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

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

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

All men are islands, surrounded by the bottomless oceans of unthinking night.

Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.

There is a point at which eccentricity begins to impact operational effectiveness.

Well then. Will the naysayers please leave the universe?

I don't like Amazon (wearing my author hat, not my customer hat).

I was an early adopter: have been on the internet continuously since late 1989, barring a six-month loss of access in the early 90s.

friend of mine who was turned down

One ape's hallucination is another ape's religious experience - it just depends on which one's god module is overactive at the time.

Crawling eldritch horrors don't get planning permission unless they're Trump's hairpiece.)

Generating ideas isn't some mystical talent that you have to be born with: it's a skill you can develop.

I'm not planning a kickstarter game. And I'm not really a game designer.

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