Brian W. Aldiss Quotes & Sayings

I think I'm undergoing a Lyra-2-type paranoia onslaught, but I'll be okay again in a minute. — Brian W. Aldiss

It is at night ... that the mind is most clear, that we are most able to hold all our life in the palm of our skull. — Brian W. Aldiss

Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts. — Brian W. Aldiss

Evil is loose in the world. I have to go." "I don't believe in evil. Mistakes, yes. Not evil." "Then perhaps you are afraid to believe it exists. It exists wherever men are. It — Brian W. Aldiss

I love you and I feel sad just like real people, so I must be human... Mustn't I? — Brian W. Aldiss

It's a funny thing in my job: you remain perpetually lonely in a world where loneliness is the rarest commodity. — Brian W. Aldiss

Whatever terrific events may inform our lives, it always comes to that in the end; we just want to lie down. — Brian W. Aldiss

Wells is teaching us to think. Burroughs and his lesser imitators are teaching us not to think. Of course, Burroughs is teaching us to wonder. The sense of wonder is in essence a religious state, blanketing out criticism. Wells was always a critic, even in his most wondrous and romantic tales.

And there, I believe, the two poles of modern fantasy stand defined. At one pole wait Wells and his honorable predecessors such as Swift; at the other, Burroughs and the commercial producers, such as Otis Adelbart Kline, and the weirdies, and horror merchants such as H.P. Lovecraft, and so all the way past Tolkien to today's non-stop fantasy worlders. Mary Shelley stands somewhere at the equator of this metaphor. — Brian W. Aldiss

The night was alive. So thickly was the snow falling that, brushing against a human face in its descent, it resembled the fur of a great beast. The fur was less cold than suffocating: it occupied space normally taken up by air and sound. But when the sledge stopped, the staid brazen tongue of a bell could be distantly heard. — Brian W. Aldiss

I think therefore I am;' I dream therefore I become — Brian W. Aldiss

An overcrowded world is the ideal place in which to be lonely. — Brian W. Aldiss

On Mars, Venus, Mercury, and the moons of Jupiter, human beings were more free - free to found their own petty nations and ruin their own lives their own way. But — Brian W. Aldiss

A writer should say to himself, not, How can I get more money?, but How can I reach more readers (without lowering standards)? — Brian W. Aldiss

He began talking to an imagined woman, achieving an eloquence that was never his when he was face to face with anyone else. — Brian W. Aldiss

The misfortune of a young man who returns to his native land after years away is that he finds his native land foreign; whereas the lands he left behind remain for ever like a mirage in his mind.
However, misfortune can itself sow seeds of creativity.
Afterword to "Hothouse" Brian Aldiss — Brian W. Aldiss

There are two kinds of writer: those that make you think, and those that make you wonder. — Brian W. Aldiss

He could see it glinting at his fingertips, ready to be fashioned. — Brian W. Aldiss

When he woke, she was gone. He lay for a long while looking up at the tent roof, wondering how much he cared. He needed company, although he was never wholly comfortable with it; he needed a woman, although he was never wholly happy with one. He wanted to talk, although he knew most talk was an admission of non-communication. — Brian W. Aldiss

How far was a feeling genuine if it did not find expression in an external act? — Brian W. Aldiss

Science Fiction had made itself a part of the general debate of our times. It has added to the literature of the world ; through its madness and freewheeling ingenuity , it has helped form the new pop music, through its raising of semi religious questions, it has become part of the underworld where drugs, mysticism, God-kicks, and sometimes even murder meet ; and lastly , it has become one of the most popular entertainment in its own rights, a wacky sort of fiction that grabs and engulfs anything new or old for its subject matter, turning it into a shining and often insubstantial wonder. — Brian W. Aldiss

Laintal Ay, you also have an inwardness to your nature. I feel it. That inwardness will distress you, yet it gives you life, it is life. — Brian W. Aldiss

Once land gets in a state, once it begins to deteriorate, it is hard to reverse the process. Land falls sick just like people - that's the whole tragedy of our time. — Brian W. Aldiss

Civilisation is the distance that man has placed between himself and his own excreta. — Brian W. Aldiss

Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta. — Brian W. Aldiss

To read is to strike a blow for culture — Brian W. Aldiss

Of the laws we can deduce from the external world, one stands above all: the Law of Transience. Nothing is intended to last. The trees fall year by year, the mountains tumble, the galaxies burn out like tall tallow candles. Nothing is intended to last - except time. The blanket of the universe wears thin, but time endures. Time is a tower, an endless mine; time is monstrous. Time is the hero. Human and inhuman characters are pinned to time like butterflies to a card; yes, though the wings stay bright, flight is forgotten. Time, like an element which can be solid, liquid or gas, has three states. In the present, it is a flux we cannot seize. In the future, it is a veiling mist. In the past, it has solidified and become glazed; then we call it history. Then it can show us nothing but our own solemn faces; it is a treacherous mirror, reflecting only our limited truths. So much is it a part of man that objectivity is impossible; so neutral is it that it appears hostile. — Brian W. Aldiss

In role-playing games, SF and fantasy have exploded into psychotherapy. — Brian W. Aldiss

-"Expansion to your ego, friend".
-"At your expense". — Brian W. Aldiss

This shall be home, where danger was my cradle, and all we have learned will guard us! — Brian W. Aldiss

Science fiction is for real, space opera is for fun. — Brian W. Aldiss

The fatal error of much science fiction has been to subscribe to an optimism based on the idea that revolution, or a new gimmick, or a bunch of strong men, or an invasion of aliens, or the conquest of other planets, or the annihilation of half the world
in short, pretty nearly anything but the facing up to the integral and irredeemable nature of mankind
can bring about utopian situations. It is the old error of the externalization of evil. — Brian W. Aldiss

To qualify as a Seeker, it was necessary to show a high serendipity factor. In my experimental behaviour pool as a child, I had exhibited such a factor, and had been selected for special training forthwith. I had taken additional courses in Philosophical, Alpha-humerals, Incidental Tetrachotomy, Apunctual Synchronicity, Homoontogenesis, and other subjects, ultimately qualifying as a Prime Esemplastic Seeker. In other words, I put two and two together in situations where other people were not thinking about addition. I connected. I made wholes greater than parts. Mine was an invaluable profession in a cosmos increasingly full of parts. — Brian W. Aldiss

Writers must fortify themselves with pride and egotism as best they can. The process is analogous to using sandbags and loose timbers to protect a house against flood. Writers are vulnerable creatures like anyone else. For what do they have in reality? Not sandbags, not timbers. Just a flimsy reputation and a name. — Brian W. Aldiss

When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults. — Brian W. Aldiss

Waves climbed the slope of the beach, fell back, and came again. — Brian W. Aldiss

We can no longer believe that after death, if we have sinned, we shall enter hell. Hell has been acted out here on Earth in the time of Nazi Germany, when even the innocent went in their millions to a hell that beggars the imagination. A profound change in attitude has come about as a result. — Brian W. Aldiss

Life was a pleasure; he looked back at its moments, many of them as much shrouded in mist as the opposite bank of the Thames; objectively, many of them held only misery, fear, confusion; but afterwards, and even at the time, he had known an exhilaration stronger than the misery, fear, or confusion. A fragment of belief came to him from another epoch: 'Cogito ergo sum'. For him that had not been true; his truth had been, 'Senito ergo sum'. I feel so I exist. He enjoyed this fearful, miserable, confused life, and not only because it made more sense than non-life. — Brian W. Aldiss