Aldiss Brian 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

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 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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fantasy is literature for teenagers. — Brian Aldiss

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Britain has had a very honourable tradition of literary sci-fi - H. G. Wells, John Wyndham, J. G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Michael Moorcock - but for whatever reason, they have never really been given the time of day on screen. — Richard Stanley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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