Top 63 Brian Aldiss Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. In role-playing games, SF and fantasy have exploded into psychotherapy.
Brian W. Aldiss
#4. 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
#5. If more people had put their fellow human beings before abstractions last century, we shouldn't be where we are now.
Brian Aldiss
#6. 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
#7. I love you and I feel sad just like real people, so I must be human... Mustn't I?
Brian W. Aldiss
#8. This shall be home, where danger was my cradle, and all we have learned will guard us!
Brian W. Aldiss
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. There are two kinds of writer: those that make you think, and those that make you wonder.
Brian W. Aldiss
#13. Obeying an inalienable law, things grew, growing riotous and strange in their impulse for growth.
Brian Aldiss
#14. 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
#15. Whatever terrific events may inform our lives, it always comes to that in the end; we just want to lie down.
Brian W. Aldiss
#16. 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
#17. Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem.
Brian Aldiss
#18. Relax, enjoy yourself. Have another drink. It's patriotic to overconsume.
Brian Aldiss
#19. My briefest ever definition of science fiction is 'Hubris clobbered by Nemesis.'
Brian Aldiss
#20. The feat represents immense achievement for the neotenic ape, species Homo sapiens. But behind this lie twooldattributesoftheapetribalismandinquisitiveness.
Brian Aldiss
#21. However you envisage your role in life, all you can do is perform it as best you can.
Brian Aldiss
#22. 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
#23. An overcrowded world is the ideal place in which to be lonely.
Brian W. Aldiss
#24. How far was a feeling genuine if it did not find expression in an external act?
Brian W. Aldiss
#25. Feedback is a pleasant thing. I get a lot of letters from unexpected people in unexpected places.
Brian Aldiss
#26. I was hardly fit for human society. Thus destiny shaped me to be a science fiction writer.
Brian 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. Keep violence in the mind where it belongs.
Brian Aldiss
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#35. He could see it glinting at his fingertips, ready to be fashioned.
Brian W. Aldiss
#36. Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.
Brian W. Aldiss
#39. I've no objection to morality, except that it's obsolete.
Brian Aldiss
#40. The shuffle only demonstrated people's fatuous belief in a political cure for a human condition.
Brian Aldiss
#41. 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
#42. That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay.
Brian Aldiss
#43. 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
#44. Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts.
Brian W. Aldiss
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. Waves climbed the slope of the beach, fell back, and came again.
Brian W. Aldiss
#52. I think I'm undergoing a Lyra-2-type paranoia onslaught, but I'll be okay again in a minute.
Brian W. Aldiss
#54. What were several fewer species of animals compared with a hundred-mile advance and another medal on another general?
Brian Aldiss
#55. 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
#56. Civilisation is the distance that man has placed between himself and his own excreta.
Brian W. Aldiss
#57. 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
#58. Man was an accident on this world or it would have been made better for him!
Brian Aldiss
#59. To be a standard shape is not all in life. To know is also important.
Brian Aldiss
#60. Let's have a toast-to the future generation of consumers, however many heads or assholes they have!
Brian Aldiss
#61. 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
#62. I have had wealth, rank and power, but, if these were all I had, how wretched I should be.
Brian Aldiss
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