Brian W. Aldiss Quotes

#1. To read is to strike a blow for culture

Brian W. Aldiss

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

Brian W. Aldiss

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

Brian W. Aldiss

#4. 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

#5. 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

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

Brian W. Aldiss

#7. I think therefore I am;' I dream therefore I become

Brian W. Aldiss

#8. 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

#9. 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

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

Brian W. Aldiss

#11. Waves climbed the slope of the beach, fell back, and came again.

Brian W. Aldiss

#12. I think I'm undergoing a Lyra-2-type paranoia onslaught, but I'll be okay again in a minute.

Brian W. Aldiss

#13. When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults.

Brian W. Aldiss

#14. Civilisation is the distance that man has placed between himself and his own excreta.

Brian W. Aldiss

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. -"Expansion to your ego, friend".
-"At your expense".

Brian W. Aldiss

#18. 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

#19. Whatever terrific events may inform our lives, it always comes to that in the end; we just want to lie down.

Brian W. Aldiss

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

Brian W. Aldiss

#21. 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

#22. This shall be home, where danger was my cradle, and all we have learned will guard us!

Brian W. Aldiss

#23. I love you and I feel sad just like real people, so I must be human... Mustn't I?

Brian W. Aldiss

#24. In role-playing games, SF and fantasy have exploded into psychotherapy.

Brian W. Aldiss

#25. An overcrowded world is the ideal place in which to be lonely.

Brian W. Aldiss

#26. How far was a feeling genuine if it did not find expression in an external act?

Brian W. Aldiss

#27. It's a funny thing in my job: you remain perpetually lonely in a world where loneliness is the rarest commodity.

Brian W. Aldiss

#28. 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