Brian Aldiss Quotations

When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults.

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

Science fiction is no more written for scientists that ghost stories are written for ghosts.

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

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.

Keep violence in the mind where it belongs.

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.

It is comparatively easy to become a writer; staying a writer, resisting formulaic work, generating ones own creativity - thats a much tougher matter.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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...

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

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?

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Fantasy is literature for teenagers.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Keep violence in the mind Where it belongs (Barefoot in the Head)

Science fiction is for real, space opera is for fun.

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

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.

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.

The day of the android has dawned.

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

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

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.

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

Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts.

When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults and they enter society, one of the politer names of hell. That is why we dread children, even if we love them, they show us the state of our decay.

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