Quotes from Brian Aldiss

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

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

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.

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

I was hardly fit for human society. Thus destiny shaped me to be a science fiction writer.

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.

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.

Whatever creativity is, it is in part a solution to a problem.

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.

When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults.

To be a standard shape is not all in life. To know is also important.

However you envisage your role in life, all you can do is perform it as best you can.

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.

That is why we dread children, even if we love them. They show us the state of our decay.

Science fiction is no more written for scientists that ghost stories are written for ghosts.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

The world would go on; man might die, but the earth still yielded up its abundance.

Science fiction is the search for a definition of mankind and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mode.

When childhood dies, its corpses are called adults.