Brian Aldiss Quotes

Why don’t you go somewhere quietly and consult your history books if you have no consciences to consult?

To read is to strike a blow for culture

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

Far from being unnatural, as you call, it is commonplace when you have evil conditions. Poverty is more strong than morality. That’s another reason why for the world must submit to progress. Misery must be decreased before everyone will choke to death on it.

Only a technological age could condemn unborn generations to exist in it, as if man were mere protoplasm, without emotion or aspiration.

I love you and I feel sad just like real people, so I must be human... Mustn't I?

Credeti că trăim în centrul universului. Eu vă spun că trăim în centrul curtii unei ferme. Poziția noastră este atat de obscură, încat nu vă puteți da seama cât este de obscură.

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

Why should you be confused just because you come from a confused civilization?

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.

Men left their strange hobbies on Earth and Venus and projected themselves into the pattern. Their entire personalities were merged with the texture of space itself. Through science, they reached immortality. It was a one-way passage. They did not return. Each Involute carried thousands or even millions of people. There they were, not dead, not living. How they exulted or wept in their transubstantiation, no one left could say. Only this could be said: man had gone, and a great emptiness was fallen over Earth.

All the time, he hoped they would understand that his arrogance masked only shyness—or did he hope that it was his shyness which masked arrogance? He did not know.
Who could presume to know? The one quality holds much of the other. Both refuse to come forward and share.

Poor little warrior, science will never invent anything to assist the titanic death you want in the contra-terrene caverns of your fee-fi-fo-fumblingly fearful id!

At least the mentor’s point was made: loneliness was psychological, not statistical.

Monica Swinton, twenty-nine, of graceful shape and lambent eye, went and sat in her living room, arranging her limbs with taste. She began by sitting and thinking; soon she was just sitting. Time waited on her shoulder with the maniac slowth it reserves for children, the insane, and wives whose husbands are away improving the world.