Brian Aldiss Quotes

In the extraordinary ancestral compost heap of your unconscious mind, I have burrowed too long.

It’s empty where kings live.

The intelligent have been overwhelmed by the dull. Is that not an invasion?" "More, I would say, of a self-betrayal.

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

They came, by what means he did not know, from outside, the vast abstraction that none of them had ever seen. He had a mental picture of a starry void in which men and monsters swam or battled, and then swiftly erased it. Such ideas did not conform with the quiet behavior of his companions; if they never spoke about outside, did they think about it?

Teddy, you know what I was thinking? How do you tell what are real things from what aren't real things?" The bear shuffled its alternatives. "Real things are good." "I wonder if time is good. I don't think Mummy likes time very much. The other day, lots of days ago, she said that time went by her. Is time real, Teddy?

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

When he woke, she was gone. He lay for a long while looking up at the tent roof, wondering how much he cared. He needed company, although he was never wholly comfortable with it; he needed a woman, although he was never wholly happy with one. He wanted to talk, although he knew most talk was an admission of non-communication.

Family must rely upon family, since governments do not comprehend families.

Irreconcilables: he should stay here and conform; he should — not stay here (remembering no time when he was not here, Harley could frame the second idea no more clearly than that). Another point of pain was that "here" and "not here" seemed to be not two halves of a homogeneous whole, but two dissonances.

You know that if you had been in charge of creation you would have found some medium less heart-breaking than Time to stage it in.

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.

If you think with your emotions, slight glandular changes are sufficient to revise your entire outlook.

Only a madman would claim that there is some thing unreal about reality.

One of the objections I have against Campbell's Astounding was that there was too little love in it. It was a very loveless magazine. They never took enough account of the feeling that is always in SF.