364 Quotes by Charles Stross

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

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 trapped in a fun-house mirror reflection of a historical society where everyone was crazy by default, driven mad by irrational laws and meaningless customs.

We’re currently living with a generation of established novelists who are embarrassingly out of date with respect to social networking, internet skills, and so on.

History is written by the survivors, a narrative they compose to explain events to themselves. So the historicity of journals like this one – their accuracy and authenticity – is a function of the reliability of the narrator.

A young filly is leading her mater in. They’re both wearing green wellies, and there’s something so indefinably horsey about them that I have to pinch myself and remember that were-ponies do not exist outside the pages of a certain bestselling kid-lit series.

Bureaucracies excel at performing tasks that must be done consistently whether the people assigned to them are brilliant performers or bumbling fools. You can’t always count on having Albert Einstein in the patent office, so you design its procedures to work even if you hire Mr. Bean by mistake.

There’s an unexpected lull in the traffic about two-thirds of the way to Darmstadt, and I make the mistake of breathing a sigh of relief. The respite is short-lived. One moment I’m driving along a seemingly empty road, bouncing from side to side on the Smart’s town-car suspension as the hairdryersized engine howls its guts out beneath my buttocks, and the next instant the dashboard in front of me lights up like a flashbulb.

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