Brian Aldiss Quotes

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.

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.

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.

When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults.

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

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

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

Fantasy is literature for teenagers.

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.

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.

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.

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

The day of the android has dawned.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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