Steve Aylett Quotes

a story is ready when it falls from your face

Ideas are self-replenishing, like snot

Used a replica gun to steal a replica sportscar and experienced a replica of remorse

I owed no morality to those who would extort it by force

An office is a machine for dying.

There's no such thing as a normal angel. It's never done that way.

What's that thing when someone gets a knock on the head and suddenly can't remember anything about himself?'
Death,' said the barman, his face a mask of disapproval.

Looking at this town with an honest eye was like biting into candy with a mouthful of cavities.

Scientists used to do an experiment whereby a dog's repeated reward for performing a task was unaccountably replaced by punishment. The dog, knowing it would be penalized for doing well or doing badly, would become melancholic and inactive. This and other unforeseeable results were funded by taxing up to sixty percent of people's earnings. People became strangely melancholic and inactive

He had long been curious at leaders intermittent calls for a return to past values and had tested the notion by trying to build a house from the sky downwards

I was never class clown in school,' said Lint in 1971. 'But I did have one of those "downward mouths".

A society will manufacture an image of progress and locate it in the direction it wishes to take us.

I crept in to find my father with pennies on his eyes - and looking closer I saw they were made of foil-covered chocolate. Of course I stole and ate them. Magical guilt? Tell me about it

One golfer a year is hit by lightning. This may be the only evidence we have of God's existence.

[...] god's cowardly, it doesn't want to know or take responsibility for what it's doing.

A hundred percent of marriages end in divorce, disappearance or death.

Painkillers are the drugs of the future

Television is light filled with someone else's anxiety.

We are a mirror to show god it's cruelty.

Beerlight was a blown circuit, where to kill a man was less a murder than a mannerism. Every major landmark was a pincushion of snipers. Cop tanks navigated a graffiti-rashed riot of needle bars, oil-scabbed neon and diced rubble. Fragile laws were shattered without effort or intent and the cops considered false arrest a moral duty. Integrity was no more than a fierce dream. Crime was the new and only art form. The authorities portrayed shock and outrage but never described what it was they had been expecting. Anyone trying to adapt was persecuted. One woman had given birth to a bulletproof child. Other denizens were bomb zombies, pocketing grenades and wandering gaunt and vacant for days before winding down and pulling the pin on themselves. There was no beach under the sidewalk. Yet in dealing with this environment the one strategy common to all was the assumption that it could be dealt with.

Dreams always end before you kill the last person.

...carved dolls stick to the rules.

Let us forget the past - this is the only way to be genuinely surprised.

His clients ranged from the IRS to the mob.On one occasion the oil industry hired him to kill the inventor of a car which was fueled by depression. The moguls didn't know how to profit from such a cheap and abundant resource.

A key and a strangler - this is all a simple tale requires.

Hang up the phone on a vampire, the definition of carefree.

Eddie knelt and lifted a rock. 'Lawyers,' he whispered.

It's hard for people to stampede when they're strutting

The best way of getting into something is to think of it as mischief.

A sniper is like a genius - it's not enough to be one, you have to be one at something.

When the abyss gazes into you, bill it.

Sanity's a virginity of the mind

The trustiest rule of social disintegration: bars burn last.

Fractal litigation, whereby the flapping of a butterfly's wings on one side of the world resulted in a massive compensation claim on the other.

How many times does a man have to shave before his chin gets the message?

Behind the bar hung a photo of Roni Loveless, the boxer who, ordered to throw a fight, burst through an inner struggle to beat not only his opponent but everyone in the arena and its locality in an outward-blooming explosion of violence against suppressive mediocrity.

The clerk tripped on the carpet, hit a window and went through, carrying with him a vase which had been on the sill. His skull broke like the vase and the vase broke like his skull, and both burst forth water mainly, and from the vase some flowers. If I could choose a death I'd make it something like that, except I'd add a good woman and some lard.

On July 13, 1994, Lint had a near-death experience, followed immediately by death.

Never refer to a large dog as a friend - he is in custody and he knows it.

What happens when the hitcher and the driver are equally murderous?

The law is where reality goes to die.

He said he didn't like my kind and I was filled with the delirious expectation that he would identify me as a common species - that there were others like myself. I controlled my excitement, but he seemed to sense it - his gaze wavered uncertainly.

Originality irritates so obscurely that people may have to evolve to scratch it.

To him Marx and Rand were the same because he went by pant size

The great thing about being ignored is that you can speak the truth with impunity.