Brian Aldiss Quotes - Page 2

When knowledge becomes formulated into a science, then it does take on a life of it's own, often alien to the human spirit that conceived it.

When you are young, you enjoy a sustained illusion that sooner or later something marvelous is going to happen, that you are going to transcend your parents' limitations.

The shuffle only demonstrated people's fatuous belief in a political cure for a human condition.

Feedback is a pleasant thing. I get a lot of letters from unexpected people in unexpected places.

The feat represents immense achievement for the neotenic ape, species Homo sapiens. But behind this lie twooldattributesoftheapetribalismandinquisitiveness.

I have had wealth, rank and power, but, if these were all I had, how wretched I should be.

If more people had put their fellow human beings before abstractions last century, we shouldn't be where we are now.

I am a writer and always was; being a writer is an integral part of my identity. Being published, being well regarded, is a component of that identity.

Man was an accident on this world or it would have been made better for him!

Obeying an inalienable law, things grew, growing riotous and strange in their impulse for growth.

What were several fewer species of animals compared with a hundred-mile advance and another medal on another general?

I can't help believing that these things that come from the subconscious mind have a sort of truth to them. It may not be a scientific truth, but it's psychological truth.

Most of my poetry lies beyond the SF field, yet here I am corralled into 'SF poetry' as part of this poetry weekend. Of course, some might say, 'you've made your own bed - now you must lie in it!' But, while fully accepting that dictum, I'm not yet quite prepared to lie down.

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

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.

The misfortune of a young man who returns to his native land after years away is that he finds his native land foreign; whereas the lands he left behind remain for ever like a mirage in his mind. However, misfortune can itself sow seeds of creativity. ---- Afterword to "Hothouse" Brian Aldiss

We belong to an age where apocalypse is our daily bread, coffee's black, and we know we're part of the abyss. Red Spider White Web is right on target in conveying that understanding. It splinters in the mind... the underworld of the century's imaginings.

The prose poem Walk The Red Road is great stuff and deserves to be read aloud. It compares quite favorably to The Walls Of Emerald by Li Chiang Yen, a Chinese poet of the late Tang period.

It's a national failing to think of politics as something that goes on in Parliament. It isn't; it's something that goes on inside us.

All over the world there must be far-reaching changes in animal behavior and habitat; if only one could have another life in which to chart it all... Ah, well, that's not a fruitful thing to wish, is it?

Fantasy is literature for teenagers.