Brian Aldiss Quotes
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What would be the effect of gradually drawing away from the iron laws under which, since its scampering pleistocene infancy, humankind had lived?
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You know why I am a prisoner-because the laws are so stupid that we prefer to break them than to live by them, although it means life-long imprisonment.
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Science fiction is no more written for scientists that ghost stories are written for ghosts.
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Frank's chromosome was now breeding as true as ever. Blood group, creed, colour of skin - nothing was proof against it. The numbers with shared consciousness, procreating for all they were worth, trebled every generation.
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Insane? To disobey a law of the universe was impossible, not insane.
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Digging deep in a Martian desert men discovered an enormous brain. It suddenly started to think at them - So they covered it up again...
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She had tried to love him.
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You are like all cruel men, sentimental; you are like all sentimental men; squeamish.
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One afternoon in early January, the weather showed a lack of character. There was no frost nor wind: the trees in the garden did not stir.
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You know that if you had been in charge of creation you would have found some medium less heart-breaking than Time to stage it in.
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He let out a yell of joy. They danced round the room. Pressure of population was such that reproduction had to be strict, controlled. Childbirth required government permission. For this moment, they had waited four years. Incoherently they cried their delight.
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At least the mentor’s point was made: loneliness was psychological, not statistical.
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The ability to change should not be despised.
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Keep violence in the mind where it belongs.
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The ambition of the original Frank had not died; it had grown subtler. It had become a wish to sample everything. The more bodily habitations there were with which to sample, the more tantalizing the idea seemed: for many experiences, belonging only to one brief era, are never repeated, and may be gone before they are perceived and tasted.
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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.
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'Are you a religious man, Joe?'Flitch pulled a face. 'I leaves that sort of thing to women.'
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The day of the android has dawned.
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Many Franks of the sixteenth generation were killed in the muck of the trenches, he died not once but many times, developing an obsessive dread of war which never left him. By the time the Americans entered the war, he was turning his many thoughts to politics.
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The midwife bustled out to the four in the antechamber and announced that the Almighty (who had recently become a Protestant) had seen fit to bless milady with a son.
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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.
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The Badlands were extensive. Ancient bomb craters and soil erosion joined hands here; man’s talent for war, coupled with his inability to manage forested land, had produced thousands of square miles of temperate purgatory, where nothing moved but dust.
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All the time, he hoped they would understand that his arrogance masked only shyness-or did he hope that it was his shyness which masked arrogance? He did not know.Who could presume to know? The one quality holds much of the other. Both refuse to come forward and share.
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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?