Brian Aldiss Quotes

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.

¿Qué puede digerir un espíritu sino palabras?

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

To qualify as a Seeker, it was necessary to show a high serendipity factor. In my experimental behaviour pool as a child, I had exhibited such a factor, and had been selected for special training forthwith. I had taken additional courses in Philosophical, Alpha-humerals, Incidental Tetrachotomy, Apunctual Synchronicity, Homoontogenesis, and other subjects, ultimately qualifying as a Prime Esemplastic Seeker. In other words, I put two and two together in situations where other people were not thinking about addition. I connected. I made wholes greater than parts. Mine was an invaluable profession in a cosmos increasingly full of parts.

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

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.

She had tried to love him.

"So what's this "sad" business mean, anyway? I mean, how often do you feel like doing it?'
'Sad? Oh, sadness is just happiness in reverse. We humans have to put up with it. Just being human is an awful burden to bear.'
'You keep on doing it? Is that why you feel compelled to collect all these old secondhand sunsets?"

I feel happy or sad. I love people. Therefore I am human. Isn't that so?

It [i.e., his look] held the fatal mixture of stupidity and cunning that lurks at the bottom of all evil.

Here is what I wrote about SF. If it has a familiar ring, my publishers liked it well enough to make it into a postcard for publicity purposes. 'I love SF for its surrealist verve, its loony non-reality, its piercing truths, its wit, its masked melancholy, its nose for damnation, its bunkum, its contempt for home comforts, its slewed astronomy, its xenophilia, its hip, its classlessness, its mysterious machines, its gaudy backdrops, its tragic insecurity.'
Science fiction has always seemed to me such a polyglot, an exotic mistress, a parasite, a kind of new language coined for the purpose of giving tongue to the demented twentieth century.

It’d be kind of silly if we killed ourselves off after all this time. If we do, we’re stupider than the cave people and I don’t think we are. I think we’re just exactly as stupid and that’s pretty bright in the long run.

Keep violence in the mind where it belongs.

Insane? To disobey a law of the universe was impossible, not insane.

Violence was regarded as an acceptable solution to many problems which would never have originated had violence not been in the air in the first place.