Brian Aldiss Quotes & Sayings

However you envisage your role in life, all you can do is perform it as best you can. — Brian Aldiss

What were several fewer species of animals compared with a hundred-mile advance and another medal on another general? — Brian Aldiss

All over the world there must be far-reaching changes in animal behavior and habitat; if only one could have another life in which to chart it all ... Ah, well, that's not a fruitful thing to wish, is it? — Brian Aldiss

It is comparatively easy to become a writer; staying a writer, resisting formulaic work, generating one's own creativity - that's a much tougher matter. — Brian Aldiss

The day of the android has dawned. — Brian Aldiss

If more people had put their fellow human beings before abstractions last century, we shouldn't be where we are now. — Brian Aldiss

I am a writer and always was; being a writer is an integral part of my identity. Being published, being well regarded, is a component of that identity. — Brian Aldiss

Why had I become a writer in the first place? Because I wasn't fit for society; I didn't fit into the system. — Brian Aldiss

It's a national failing to think of politics as something that goes on in Parliament. It isn't; it's something that goes on inside us. — Brian Aldiss

Obeying an inalienable law, things grew, growing riotous and strange in their impulse for growth. — Brian Aldiss

I've no objection to morality, except that it's obsolete. — Brian Aldiss

We belong to an age where apocalypse is our daily bread, coffee's black, and we know we're part of the abyss. Red Spider White Web is right on target in conveying that understanding. It splinters in the mind ... the underworld of the century's imaginings. — Brian Aldiss

When you are young, you enjoy a sustained illusion that sooner or later something marvelous is going to happen, that you are going to transcend your parents' limitations. — Brian Aldiss

Most SF is about madness, or what is currently ruled to be madness; this is part of its attraction - it's always playing with how much the human mind can encompass. — Brian Aldiss

Man was an accident on this world or it would have been made better for him! — Brian Aldiss

Science fiction is the search for a definition of mankind and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post Gothic mode. — Brian Aldiss

To be a standard shape is not all in life. To know is also important. — Brian Aldiss

Fantasy is literature for teenagers. — Brian Aldiss

Its at night, when perhaps we should be dreaming, that the mind is most clear, that we are most able to hold all our life in the palm of our skull. I dont know if anyone has ever pointed out that great attraction of insomnia before, but it is so; the night seems to release a little more of our vast backward inheritance of instincts and feelings; as with the dawn, a little honey is allowed to ooze between the lips of the sandwich, a little of the stuff of dreams to drip into the waking mind. — Brian Aldiss

That's the artist's role - to strike out always for something new, to break away, to defy, to ... grapple with the unfamiliar. — Brian Aldiss

The prose poem Walk The Red Road is great stuff and deserves to be read aloud. It compares quite favorably to The Walls Of Emerald by Li Chiang Yen, a Chinese poet of the late Tang period. — Brian Aldiss

The feat represents immense achievement for the neotenic ape, species Homo sapiens. But behind this lie twooldattributesoftheapetribalismandinquisitiveness. — Brian Aldiss

That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay. — Brian Aldiss

Let's have a toast-to the future generation of consumers, however many heads or assholes they have! — Brian Aldiss

I have had wealth, rank and power, but, if these were all I had, how wretched I should be. — Brian Aldiss

When knowledge becomes formulated into a science, then it does take on a life of it's own, often alien to the human spirit that conceived it. — Brian Aldiss

My briefest ever definition of science fiction is 'Hubris clobbered by Nemesis.' — Brian Aldiss

Relax, enjoy yourself. Have another drink. It's patriotic to overconsume. — Brian Aldiss

Most of my poetry lies beyond the SF field, yet here I am corralled into 'SF poetry' as part of this poetry weekend. Of course, some might say, 'you've made your own bed - now you must lie in it!' But, while fully accepting that dictum, I'm not yet quite prepared to lie down ... — Brian Aldiss

The shuffle only demonstrated people's fatuous belief in a political cure for a human condition. — Brian Aldiss

I was hardly fit for human society. Thus destiny shaped me to be a science fiction writer. — Brian Aldiss

Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem. — Brian Aldiss

Feedback is a pleasant thing. I get a lot of letters from unexpected people in unexpected places. — Brian Aldiss

Keep violence in the mind where it belongs. — Brian Aldiss

I can't help believing that these things that come from the subconscious mind have a sort of truth to them. It may not be a scientific truth, but it's psychological truth. — Brian Aldiss