No, you're not making this up. You just didn't understand a word you read, or how it was meant:

The original Torvalds quote in context:

>"When I started the whole design, started doing programming in user space, which I had not done for 15 years, it was like, wow, this is so easy. I don't need to worry about all these things, I have infinite stack, malloc just works. But in the kernel space, you have to worry about locking, you have to worry about security, you have to worry about the hardware.