Steve Aylett Quotes & Sayings

Biting enemies seems to be acceptable in a surprisingly narrow range of circumstances, or so a ninja shouted at me once — Steve Aylett

I knew books could see people around them, they ground their tiny teeth, tried to rattle like windows, stories to tell. — Steve Aylett

Originality irritates so obscurely that people may have to evolve to scratch it. — Steve Aylett

He has been positively growing tusks trying to create a breed of human insect which will continue to live on this accursed planet. Everyone needs a goal. — Steve Aylett

The most amusing thing about a pantomime horse is the necessity of having to shoot it twice. — Steve Aylett

Nothing like a spider in the mouth to get you thinking.
— Steve Aylett

The best way of getting into something is to think of it as mischief. — Steve Aylett

Honesty is the voice that is acceptable in every matter. — Steve Aylett

What's life in this nation? Collect emptiness in a household of cornflakes. Transient fuel gobbles attention, the television aches, the truth walks. Scheme worms welcome your corpse, trap clicks and you're in heaven, bored rigid
— Steve Aylett

It's hard for people to stampede when they're strutting — Steve Aylett

What's that thing when someone gets a knock on the head and suddenly can't remember anything about himself?'
Death,' said the barman, his face a mask of disapproval. — Steve Aylett

In America, fundamentalist Christians believe the world was created 6,000 years ago - in England people drink in bars that are older than that. — Steve Aylett

This continued a negotiation in the spirit of sinking hoods and strange smiles, all that elite malarkey. — Steve Aylett

How many times does a man have to shave before his chin gets the message?
— Steve Aylett

One thing you'll say for skeletons, they'll always give you a smile. — Steve Aylett

Pounce if I'm outta some arbitrary line, Specter, but from what you say this demilout's runnin' hogwild over creation with no better motive than a gratuitous and luxurious will to do evil. — Steve Aylett

Scientists used to do an experiment whereby a dog's repeated reward for performing a task was unaccountably replaced by punishment. The dog, knowing it would be penalized for doing well or doing badly, would become melancholic and inactive. This and other unforeseeable results were funded by taxing up to sixty percent of people's earnings. People became strangely melancholic and inactive
— Steve Aylett

The law is where reality goes to die. — Steve Aylett

a story is ready when it falls from your face — Steve Aylett

I crept in to find my father with pennies on his eyes - and looking closer I saw they were made of foil-covered chocolate. Of course I stole and ate them. Magical guilt? Tell me about it — Steve Aylett

Freedom in cyberspace'd be fine and dandy if we happened to live there. — Steve Aylett

Dreams always end before you kill the last person. — Steve Aylett

Any act worth a damn can not be ignored and when an effective person is ignored it's the result of a deliberate series of steps on his or her part. — Steve Aylett

Television is light filled with someone else's anxiety. — Steve Aylett

Fractal litigation, whereby the flapping of a butterfly's wings on one side of the world resulted in a massive compensation claim on the other. — Steve Aylett

[...] god's cowardly, it doesn't want to know or take responsibility for what it's doing. — Steve Aylett

No matter how good the idea, there's always an advocate extreme enough to deter people. — Steve Aylett

We have truth in order not to die of art.
— Steve Aylett

Since childhood I'd been suspected of imagination — Steve Aylett

From space this Earth is incandescent with abominations - the gods write their signature in our entrails — Steve Aylett

Most books are so well written they barely have any effect on the reader's senses — Steve Aylett

A key and a strangler - this is all a simple tale requires. — Steve Aylett

Sanity's a virginity of the mind
— Steve Aylett

Beerlight was a blown circuit, where to kill a man was less a murder than a mannerism. Every major landmark was a pincushion of snipers. Cop tanks navigated a graffiti-rashed riot of needle bars, oil-scabbed neon and diced rubble. Fragile laws were shattered without effort or intent and the cops considered false arrest a moral duty. Integrity was no more than a fierce dream. Crime was the new and only art form. The authorities portrayed shock and outrage but never described what it was they had been expecting. Anyone trying to adapt was persecuted. One woman had given birth to a bulletproof child. Other denizens were bomb zombies, pocketing grenades and wandering gaunt and vacant for days before winding down and pulling the pin on themselves. There was no beach under the sidewalk. Yet in dealing with this environment the one strategy common to all was the assumption that it could be dealt with. — Steve Aylett

He said he didn't like my kind and I was filled with the delirious expectation that he would identify me as a common species - that there were others like myself. I controlled my excitement, but he seemed to sense it - his gaze wavered uncertainly. — Steve Aylett

There's no such thing as a normal angel. It's never done that way. — Steve Aylett

In books there's nothing of the fish covered in the coldness of the sea, or the feeling of a star touching space. Bad for business. — Steve Aylett

I owed no morality to those who would extort it by force — Steve Aylett

Melody tried to distract me in a skirt made of brain skin. — Steve Aylett

On July 13, 1994, Lint had a near-death experience, followed immediately by death. — Steve Aylett

Used a replica gun to steal a replica sportscar and experienced a replica of remorse — Steve Aylett

When the abyss gazes into you, bill it. — Steve Aylett

A sniper is like a genius - it's not enough to be one, you have to be one at something. — Steve Aylett

The clerk tripped on the carpet, hit a window and went through, carrying with him a vase which had been on the sill. His skull broke like the vase and the vase broke like his skull, and both burst forth water mainly, and from the vase some flowers. If I could choose a death I'd make it something like that, except I'd add a good woman and some lard. — Steve Aylett

He had long been curious at leaders intermittent calls for a return to past values and had tested the notion by trying to build a house from the sky downwards — Steve Aylett

Let us forget the past - this is the only way to be genuinely surprised. — Steve Aylett

To him Marx and Rand were the same because he went by pant size — Steve Aylett

Painkillers are the drugs of the future — Steve Aylett

What happens when the hitcher and the driver are equally murderous?
— Steve Aylett

An office is a machine for dying. — Steve Aylett

Behind the bar hung a photo of Roni Loveless, the boxer who, ordered to throw a fight, burst through an inner struggle to beat not only his opponent but everyone in the arena and its locality in an outward-blooming explosion of violence against suppressive mediocrity. — Steve Aylett

Stab me if you can enjoy it - but not if it feels like a duty. Stab me vertically if I'm lying down and horizontally if I'm running — Steve Aylett

Seemed she should learn to smile when she was unhappy, to stop laughing, to speak up, to never speak to strangers, to share guilt for the acts of strangers, that strangers made the laws of the land, that the laws of the land valued things over life, that life ended if a stranger decided it, to be where she could be found, to feel one thing and do another. How could she hang so many contradictions in one skull — Steve Aylett

Those who lead double lives do so because they can only count that far — Steve Aylett

His clients ranged from the IRS to the mob.On one occasion the oil industry hired him to kill the inventor of a car which was fueled by depression. The moguls didn't know how to profit from such a cheap and abundant resource. — Steve Aylett

Gun stripping is the tea ceremony of America. — Steve Aylett

One golfer a year is hit by lightning. This may be the only evidence we have of God's existence. — Steve Aylett

Satire works in a bunch of specific ways, like a very precisely-geared bomb. It's a bit like something that looks harmless, and you swallow it, but once it's inside you it's too late, and it triggers, blowing up. And it's your specific inner beliefs and faulty arguments that trigger a satire bomb. If your arguments work, the bomb doesn't trigger, it doesn't need to. — Steve Aylett

Ideas are self-replenishing, like snot — Steve Aylett

A hundred percent of marriages end in divorce, disappearance or death. — Steve Aylett

Life and death have equal authority in nature. When laws contradict so fundamentally they cause mere confusion in the average soul — Steve Aylett

The great thing about being ignored is that you can speak the truth with impunity. — Steve Aylett

Looking at this town with an honest eye was like biting into candy with a mouthful of cavities. — Steve Aylett

...carved dolls stick to the rules. — Steve Aylett

A society will manufacture an image of progress and locate it in the direction it wishes to take us. — Steve Aylett

Murder's the taking of one man's life by another - war's the other way around. — Steve Aylett

Oppression evolves, like everything else. — Steve Aylett

The optimist sees the future as a rabbit sees the oncoming truck - getting bigger, not closer. — Steve Aylett

I was never class clown in school,' said Lint in 1971. 'But I did have one of those "downward mouths". — Steve Aylett

We are a mirror to show god it's cruelty. — Steve Aylett

The trustiest rule of social disintegration: bars burn last. — Steve Aylett

Hang up the phone on a vampire, the definition of carefree. — Steve Aylett

Parker always felt things in his bones because, he said, it saved space — Steve Aylett