H.W. Charles Quotes

It is never worth while to make rents in a garment for the sake of mending them? Nor to create doubts in order to show how cleverly we can quiet them.

If I knew I had 25 years left to live, I would spend 20 of them in preparation.

Come my, heart, up and away!

It is not well to make great changes in old age.

May every one of us believe Him better, and have greater thoughts of Him, and never let us be guilty henceforth of confining, as it were, within iron bonds the limitless One of Israel.

He cannot be a glorious God unless His people ultimately are a glorified people.

But no thoughtful man's life is uninteresting or devoid of marvels. A sincere life cannot be empty of memorable occurrences.

It is a reading age, a preaching age, a working age, but it is not a praying age.

You may have the gift of giving.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Well then. Will the naysayers please leave the universe?

--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.

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

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.

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.

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

Lawyers do not mix with diplomacy.

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

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

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.

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

Had enough of my poetry yet? That's why they pay me to fight demons instead.

I'm an individual. I do not want to get into a pissing match with an organization that is a de-facto gigadollar-turnover multinational!

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

Personal pride is probably a bad guide to merit.

I have not watched the TV show. I do not generally watch TV sci-fi drama shows. They make me itch.

Any replacement to the current copyright position (life plus 70 years) needs to have an answer lined up for this, and similar, messy edge cases.

I grew up on second hand bookshops and libraries.

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

I tend to think that immortal souls, invisible sky daddies, and Santa Claus all belong in the same basket. The disposition of that basket is left as an exercise for the reader.

I was Computer Shopper's linux columnist for more than half a decade, from the late 90s onwards. Yes, I know about Linux. (My first review of a Linux distro in the press was published in late 1996.)

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

I like lassic British spy thrillers. Seriously. If the cold war was still on, that's something I'd be writing.

I do not click on random youtube videos.

Speech recognition is utterly crap for writing fiction. If you try reading a novel aloud you'll soon figure out why - written prose style is utterly unlike the spoken word.