Brian Aldiss Quotes

Life on the big slope was endurable, and sometimes more than just endurable, for the human spirit was a genius for making mountains out of molehills of happiness.

This shall be home, where danger was my cradle, and all we have learned will guard us!

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.

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

It's a funny thing in my job: you remain perpetually lonely in a world where loneliness is the rarest commodity.

On Mars, Venus, Mercury, and the moons of Jupiter, human beings were more free — free to found their own petty nations and ruin their own lives their own way.

Evil is loose in the world. I have to go.” “I don’t believe in evil. Mistakes, yes. Not evil.” “Then perhaps you are afraid to believe it exists. It exists wherever men are.

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

In role-playing games, SF and fantasy have exploded into psychotherapy.

Once land gets in a state, once it begins to deteriorate, it is hard to reverse the process. Land falls sick just like people — that's the whole tragedy of our time.

Of the laws we can deduce from the external world, one stands above all: the Law of Transience. Nothing is intended to last. The trees fall year by year, the mountains tumble, the galaxies burn out like tall tallow candles. Nothing is intended to last — except time. The blanket of the universe wears thin, but time endures. Time is a tower, an endless mine; time is monstrous. Time is the hero. Human and inhuman characters are pinned to time like butterflies to a card; yes, though the wings stay bright, flight is forgotten. Time, like an element which can be solid, liquid or gas, has three states. In the present, it is a flux we cannot seize. In the future, it is a veiling mist. In the past, it has solidified and become glazed; then we call it history. Then it can show us nothing but our own solemn faces; it is a treacherous mirror, reflecting only our limited truths. So much is it a part of man that objectivity is impossible; so neutral is it that it appears hostile.

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.

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.

Science Fiction had made itself a part of the general debate of our times. It has added to the literature of the world ; through its madness and freewheeling ingenuity , it has helped form the new pop music, through its raising of semi religious questions, it has become part of the underworld where drugs, mysticism, God-kicks, and sometimes even murder meet ; and lastly , it has become one of the most popular entertainment in its own rights, a wacky sort of fiction that grabs and engulfs anything new or old for its subject matter, turning it into a shining and often insubstantial wonder.