Brian Aldiss Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults.

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.

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

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)

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fantasy is literature for teenagers.

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.

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.

The day of the android has dawned.

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

Keep violence in the mind Where it belongs.

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