Brian W. Aldiss Quotes

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

I think I'm undergoing a Lyra-2-type paranoia onslaught, but I'll be okay again in a minute.

-"Expansion to your ego, friend".
-"At your expense".

The night was alive. So thickly was the snow falling that, brushing against a human face in its descent, it resembled the fur of a great beast. The fur was less cold than suffocating: it occupied space normally taken up by air and sound. But when the sledge stopped, the staid brazen tongue of a bell could be distantly heard.

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.

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

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

An overcrowded world is the ideal place in which to be lonely.

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

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

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

Perhaps that had been one of the ineradicable faults of mankind - for even a convinced atheist had to admit there were faults - that it was never content with a thing as a thing; it had to turn things into symbols of other things. A rainbow was never only a rainbow; a storm was a sign of celestial anger; and even from the puddingy earth came forth dark chthonian gods. What did it all mean? What an agnostic believed and what the willowy parson believed were not only irreconcilable systems of thought: they were equally valid systems of thought because, somewhere along the evolutionary line, man, developing this habit of thinking of symbols, had provided himself with more alternatives than he could manage. Animals moved in no such channel of imagination - they copulated and they ate; but the the saint, bread was a symbol of life, as the phallus was to the pagan. The animals themselves were pressed into symbolic service - and not only in the medieval bestiaries, by any means.

Such a usage was a distortion, although man seemed unable to ratiocinate without it. That had been the trouble right from the beginning. Perhaps it had even been the beginning, back among the first men that man could never get clearly defined (for the early men, being also symbols, had to be either lumbering brutes, or timid noble savages, or to undergo some other interpretation). Perhaps the first fire, the first tool, the first wheel, the first carving in a limestone cave, had each possessed a

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. But

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

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. It

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.

We can no longer believe that after death, if we have sinned, we shall enter hell. Hell has been acted out here on Earth in the time of Nazi Germany, when even the innocent went in their millions to a hell that beggars the imagination. A profound change in attitude has come about as a result.

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.

Civilisation is the distance that man has placed between himself and his own excreta.

How far was a feeling genuine if it did not find expression in an external act?

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.

It occurred to him that perhaps all his life he had only been hearing echoes of himself, and that his morality, on which he had once prided himself, was merely a refusal to permit other people into his life.

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

I think therefore I am;' I dream therefore I become

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

Wells is teaching us to think. Burroughs and his lesser imitators are teaching us not to think. Of course, Burroughs is teaching us to wonder. The sense of wonder is in essence a religious state, blanketing out criticism. Wells was always a critic, even in his most wondrous and romantic tales.

And there, I believe, the two poles of modern fantasy stand defined. At one pole wait Wells and his honorable predecessors such as Swift; at the other, Burroughs and the commercial producers, such as Otis Adelbart Kline, and the weirdies, and horror merchants such as H.P. Lovecraft, and so all the way past Tolkien to today's non-stop fantasy worlders. Mary Shelley stands somewhere at the equator of this metaphor.