Quote

Personal pride is probably a bad guide to merit.

Charles Stross

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Charles Stross
Age: 60
Born: 1964
Born: October 18
Pharmacist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Charlie Stross
Pride
Personal
Probably
Guide
Merit
Guides

More quotes by Charles Stross

Image
[Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.]
Charles Stross
Image
Where would dictators be without our compliant amnesia? Make the collective lose its memory, you can conceal anything.
Charles Stross
Image
Back before the internet we had a name for people who bought a single copy of our books and lent them to all their friends without charging: we called them librarians.
Charles Stross
Image
Had enough of my poetry yet? That's why they pay me to fight demons instead.
Charles Stross
Image
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.)
Charles Stross
Image
I reckon I can count on 30 more writing years, averaging a book a year (I can't keep up the 2-2.5 a year I used to do these days). And these days I've gotten round to wondering, for each new idea, do I want to be remembered for this? before I get to the point of spending a year on it.
Charles Stross
Image
I'm not planning a kickstarter game. And I'm not really a game designer.
Charles Stross
Image
While writing a novel I almost completely stop reading books in the same sub-genre for the duration.
Charles Stross
Image
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).
Charles Stross
Image
Personally, I avoid deus ex machina like the plague - if you have to use one, it means you failed to set up the universe and the plot properly. It's like a whodunnit where there's no actual way for the reader to identify the perpetrator before the climactic reveal: there's no sense of closure for the reader.
Charles Stross
Image
Biggest influence: my mother.
Charles Stross
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity.
Charles Stross
Image
Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy.
Charles Stross
Image
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
Image
No two books come out the same way. Some I write by the seat of my pants others are planned in minute detail.
Charles Stross
Image
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
Image
I'm wearing black leggings and a loose top festooned with a Menger sponge of empty pockets stitched out of smaller pockets and smaller still, almost down to the limits of visibility woven in freefall by hordes of tiny otaku spiders, I'm told, their genes programmed by an obsessive-compulsive sartorial topologist.
Charles Stross
Image
The late 90s were crazy science-fictional if you were inside the superheated steam bubble of the dot-com 1.0 industry.
Charles Stross